US health expenditure per capita

It is a small indignity of our era that healthcare spending and podcast creation should grow at the same rate, as though one were treating the other. Perhaps the podcasts were the treatment. Perhaps that explains the state of healthcare.

Both jumped sharply in 2020 for pandemic reasons. US health expenditure per capita spiked as covid care, testing, and hospitalization loaded the national bill, while the global podcast count exploded as millions of locked-down would-be broadcasters turned empty commutes into microphone time. The correlation is the same year's bill, itemized strangely — one in hospital invoices, one in RSS feeds.

So we are left with two very different responses to the same anxiety: buy care, talk into a microphone. Both, in their way, were medicine. Only one of them was covered.