High U.S. health care spending buys poor health system outcomes: U.S. score on health system attributes relative to scores of 10 other advanced country peers
| 10-peer-country score (non-U.S. average) | Highest-scoring non-U.S. country | Lowest-scoring non-U.S. country | U.S. score | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||||
| Care process* | 0.88 | 1.16 | 0.49 | |
| Affordability | 3.06 | 3.84 | 2.28 | |
| Timeliness | 1.15 | 1.71 | 0.51 | |
| Administrative efficiency | 2.11 | 2.63 | 0.83 | |
| Equity | 2.04 | 2.87 | 1.41 | |
| Health care outcomes | 1.85 | 2.38 | 1.13 | |
| 1 |
* “Care process” covers prevention, safe care, coordination, and patient engagement.
Notes: Because the different performance evaluations drew on different data sources and thus were not based on a common indexing scale, each measure was first transformed to make the worst-performing measure equal to 1. Then this normalized index was re-sorted to make the U.S. score equal to 1 on each measure. This process allows us to show how far the U.S. system falls from the average performance of all 10 peer countries and the performance of the highest- and lowest-scoring peer countries. The 10 comparison countries are Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
Source: Author’s analysis of data from Schneider et al. 2017