About

The American Healthcare Conundrum is an investigative data-journalism project. The United States spends about $15,474 per person per year on healthcare. Japan spends about $5,790 and has the highest life expectancy in the OECD. That gap is roughly $3.24 trillion a year.

This project finds it, one fixable problem at a time.

How it works

Each issue takes one specific, documented source of excess spending, quantifies it from primary federal data (CMS cost reports, Medicare Part D claims, OECD health statistics, SEC filings), and recommends a specific policy fix. Every number carries a citation. Every analysis script is open-source and reproducible from a clean clone. Caveats are named explicitly, not buried. The math is the argument.

Independence

No institutional affiliations. No university, think tank, or funder who might find a particular finding inconvenient. The work is funded by readers and by data sponsors who want the numbers to be public.

The data fund

Some findings require licensed or restricted datasets that public files cannot answer alone. Those are crowdfunded in the open at ahcdata.fund, where every dollar buys data, not salary, and every sponsor is named.

Get involved

Read and check the code on GitHub. Subscribe to get each issue in your inbox. If you think a number is wrong, push back: reply to any issue or email vonrexroad@gmail.com. Corrections are published.