Americans pay top prices for health care and the bill keeps rising

Americans are spending more than twice as much for health care than people in other developed countries and more than double what they used to spend, a new batch of figures from the Johns Hopkins University shows.

Despite efforts to curb costs, the amount spent per person in the United States was $9,892 in 2016, 117 percent more than the tally in 2000 when researchers at Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health first collected such spending data.

The main reason was not that Americans were using more medicine and seeing more doctors than people in other countries. It’s that everything was more expensive, from doctor and nurse salaries and pharmaceuticals to hospital administration and medical services.