Overview
“HOW THE 11 COUNTRIES RANK ON PERFORMANCE
“The top-performing countries overall are Norway, the Netherlands, and Australia (Exhibit 1).
“The next three countries in the ranking — the U.K., Germany, and New Zealand — perform very similarly to one another (Exhibit 2). The U.S. ranks #11 — last. Exhibit 2 shows the extent to which the U.S. is an outlier: its performance falls well below the average of the other countries and far below the two countries ranked directly above it, Switzerland and Canada. In fact, the U.S. is such an outlier that we have calculated the average performance based on the other 10 countries, excluding the U.S. (see How We Measured Performance). The U.S. is last on all domains of performance except care process, on which it ranks #2.”
Source: Eric C. Schneider et al., Mirror, Mirror 2021 — Reflecting Poorly: Health Care in the U.S. Compared to Other High-Income Countries (Commonwealth Fund, Aug. 2021). doi.org/10.26099/01dv-h208
“The U.S. continues to outspend other nations on health care, devoting nearly twice as much of its GDP as the average OECD country. U.S. health spending reached nearly 17 percent of GDP in 2019, far above the 10 other countries compared in this report. Moreover, high U.S. out-of-pocket health spending per person, the second-highest in the OECD, makes it difficult for many Americans to access needed care.
“The U.S. has managed to keep pace with or exceed other countries on several measures of care process included in the report, such as influenza vaccination rates for older adults, lower rates of postoperative sepsis after abdominal surgery, and more use of patient-facing health information technology for provider communications and prescription filling. But the U.S. still lags other nations on measures of health care outcomes, access to care, equity, and administrative efficiency.”
Source: Eric C. Schneider et al., Mirror, Mirror 2021 — Reflecting Poorly: Health Care in the U.S. Compared to Other High-Income Countries (Commonwealth Fund, Aug. 2021). doi.org/10.26099/01dv-h208
World Health Systems Facts is a project of the Real Reporting Foundation. We provide reliable statistics and other data from authoritative sources regarding health systems and policies in the US and sixteen other nations.
Page last updated August 7, 2022 by Doug McVay, Editor.