What you suggest - that you can't normalize consumption of X to population - is absolutely absurd. If we follow this broken logic we can easily claim that no country can be compared to any other country in any way.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a good way to look at productivity of any country, it measures overall productivity of any given country. When you measure portion of say manufacturing or healthcare against GDP it tells you how much of that country's "effort" goes toward that activity. So when I say 15% of GDP is spent on healthcare, that translates to 15c of every dollar going to healthcare.

When you want to compare countries with different populations you simply normalize to population, so you have GDP/population of country A compared to GDP/population of country B. This is Economy 101.

You can also look at raw numbers, total money expended/population vs. total money expended/population. This isn't as accurate as above, but does and can give you an idea.

Last but not least, you can just look at costs vs. cost, this is by far crudest method because it does not reflect the fact that countries with higher population tend to be more productive than countries with lower population.

Your attempted critique of all these methods reveal your complete lack of understanding of these concepts. When you start talking about specific differences between countries you show lack of understanding of normalization, and when you start rejecting it as a concept you show level of ignorance comparable to science deniers.

This isn't an argument of correlation, we are not looking at modeling system, it is about looking at overall effectiveness of each system. Money goes in, results get produced kind of analysis. What numbers tell us is that US SPENDS TOO MUCH and DOESN'T GET MORE THAN OTHERS IN RETURN.

It boggles my mind that you can look at other countries, beating US in most healthcare metrics ON A FRACTION OF COST, and turn around and say that socialized medicine doesn't work. Yes it does, and it is A LOT cheaper.

Still, never mind socialized medicine, my original point was simply that it cost more to treat someone in an emergency room than, for example, at a general practitioner office. You ideological zeal won't even allow you to see that TAXPAYERS ALREADY PAY FOR EMERGENCY ROOM USE BY UNINSURED, so if you got stuck with a bill, wouldn't it be more effective to TRY TO MINIMIZE IT?!

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