US health expenditure per capita

There is a faintly worrying elegance to the observation that Americans spent more on medical care in direct proportion to how many board games they bought. Perhaps the board games were the medical care. Perhaps the bills arrived between turns.

Both curves jumped sharply in 2020 for pandemic reasons. Health spending spiked as covid testing, treatment, hospitalization, and vaccines loaded the national bill, while board game sales surged as housebound families rediscovered the dining-room table and began shouting at each other over Settlers of Catan. One is the cost of the virus; the other is the cost of being stuck indoors with your own family.

So the correlation is really two pandemic budgets — the hospital and the hobby — both growing at the same unhappy rate. Neither fixes the other. But one, at least, made the waiting tolerable.