How the U.S. Healthcare System Compares to Other Countries
Paradox: Increased Prices for Lower Quality
A widely known fact among the American population is that our healthcare is in turmoil. Many have even come to accept this fact as a common burden of living, but this issue should not be accepted or normalized by the public. We will collectively come to comprehend this development when we dissect the healthcare crisis in a more comparative framework.
To begin, in most healthcare system performance-ranking analyses, the United States often pales in comparison to other industrialized countries. Our healthcare system is twice as or even arguably three times more expensive than any of the other developed countries.
For example, author Elizabeth Rosenthal discovered that “the average hospital cost per day in the United States was $4,300 in 2013, more than three times the cost in Australia and about ten times the cost in Spain.” And, as one might expect, the costs of hospital overnight stays have been continually rising since then.
Allocating taxpayer money into the healthcare system would be perfectly reasonable if a positive correlation between higher spending and higher quality of care existed. However, research demonstrates that quite the opposite is happening in our case. In my interview with Joe Paduda, the principal of Health Strategy Associates and a nationally recognized expert strategist, he declared that “we pay twice as much as the average country, to get results that are generally worse than average.”
In fact, healthcare spending has been gradually increasing about tenfold since 1980, with no evident increase in the quality of our healthcare alongside it. This disparity poses an inherently problematic situation as the United States keeps investing money into a system that does not properly reflect the efficiency and quality it should.
Having established that the United States spends significantly more on healthcare than other high-income countries, this predicament raises the question: how much more precisely are these investments? Well, in 2016, our gross domestic product (GDP) was 17.8 percent, while the average of other countries was only 11.5 percent. GDP is utilized as a “common indicator used to track the health of a nation’s economy” and “calculated by adding together: personal and public consumption, public and private investment, [and] government spending.”
The 6.3 percent difference between the two GDPs may seem relatively small, but in terms of actual currency, that amount is astronomical. Unfortunately, this gap has also continued to widen every year since 1980, showing an uphill slope of U.S. taxpayer dollars. While investment into the nation’s health is a productive way to spend taxpayer money, the returns in healthcare performance and quality suggest that the money is going elsewhere and not being allocated toward improving patient wellness.
In a report of the performance rankings of different countries’ healthcare, the United Kingdom ranks first, Austria second, the Netherlands third . . . with the United States as eleventh overall. Eleventh place is not necessarily too bad until you consider that there are only eleven high-income countries in the running — meaning that the United States ranks last.
Five factors weighed into the performance rankings: care process, access, administrative efficiency, equity, and healthcare outcomes. The United States ranks fifth in the care process, tenth in administrative efficiency, and eleventh in access, equity, and healthcare outcomes. In comparing rankings with other countries, we can safely conclude that our healthcare is unsatisfactory in performance on many levels.
This determination raises the question of whether these scores are reflected in Americans’ health and well-being. In a brief comparison to other developed countries, our life expectancy is lower, our infant mortality rate is drastically higher, more patients die from cardiovascular diseases, more patients are diagnosed with diabetes, and more patients are unable to continue pharmaceutical follow-up treatments, among myriad other not-so-great statistics.
The health disparity within the U.S. population is a major contributing reason why our nation is ranked last in three major components. Many patients cannot access the care they desperately need to get better, and some who do manage to ultimately end up receiving poor, inequitable care.
A saying that comes to mind is “Something is always better than nothing,” but can this unsatisfactory quality of healthcare that American patients receive nowadays be considered something of substantial value?
Series 1 Article 2
Enjoyed this article? Over the next weeks, I’m going to be sharing excerpts from my book in this article series. The Healthcare Conversation: Navigating the U.S. Health System is available now on Amazon in both paperback and ebook format. If you want to read more stories like this, please check it out and let me know what you think! To connect, you can reach me here via email at linhdoanvo@gmail.com or on social media at linhnout on Instagram.
