...
| |
Canada |
France |
UK |
US |
|
Health spending per capita, 2002 |
$2,931 |
$2,736 |
$2,160 |
$5,267 |
|
Private share of spending |
30% |
24% |
17% |
55% |
|
Life expectancy |
79.7 |
79.2 |
78.1 |
77.1 |
|
Infant mortality per 1,000 births |
5.2 |
4.5 |
5 |
6.8 |
|
Physicians per 1,000 people |
2.1 |
3.3 |
2 |
2.7 |
|
Nurses per 1,000 people |
9.9 |
7 |
9 |
8.1 |
|
Hospital beds per 1,000 people |
3.2 |
4.2 |
3.9 |
2.9 |
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Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development, |
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GECD Health Data 2004 |
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The Health Care Crisis and What to Do About It
...How do we know that the US health care system is highly inefficient? An
important part of the evidence takes the form of international comparisons. The
table above compares US
health care with the systems of three other advanced countries. It's clear from
the table that the United States has achieved something remarkable. We spend far
more on health care than other advanced countries—almost twice as much per
capita as France, almost two and a half times as much as Britain. Yet we do
considerably worse even than the British on basic measures of health
performance, such as life expectancy and infant mortality.
One might argue that the US health care system actually provides better care
than foreign systems, but that the effects of this superior care are more than
offset by unhealthy US lifestyles. ... But a variety of evidence refutes this
argument. The data show that the
United States does not stand out in the quantity of care, as measured by
such indicators as the number of physicians, nurses, and hospital beds per
capita. ...The frequent claim that the United States pays high medical prices to
avoid long waiting lists for care also fails to hold up in the face of the
evidence: there are long waiting lists for elective surgery in some non-US
systems, but not all, and the procedures for which these waiting lists exist
account for only 3 percent of US health care spending.
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