Today’ s bad piece of visualization comes from Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture economics blog. He posts three graphs, from Jameyer’s Flickr stream, showing how U.S. health care costs have gone up more than other countries. At first glance, the graphs tell a compelling picture. The U.S. spends more on health care than other nations do when considered as a percent of Gross Domestic Product. The huge problem that I have with the graph is that it uses Flags to represent each country at each data point. That makes the images too confusing, and detracts from the story that is trying to be told. One simple improvement would to be to use the flags only on the last data point, and use a horizontal line graph for the other data points. The second problem is that the President in power is placed on the x-axis. The implication is that the President’s administration is responsible for the ensuing rise in health care costs. I am sorry, but U.S. Presidents do not have that much power. There are a variety of causes for increasing health care costs.
