September 10, 2015

Just the facts: Healthcare in US

A new brief on the Peterson-Kaiser Health System Tracker finds that the quality of the U.S. health system is improving in many areas, but comparable countries continue to outperform the United States on key measures.

Findings include:

    The U.S. health system has improved on a wide variety of quality measures, including mortality amenable to health care; the number of hospital-acquired infections; and the percentage of children receiving all recommended doses of vaccines.

    The United States has worsened on other measures, including health-related quality of life (self-reported healthy days and days in which activities were interrupted by poor health).

    The United States outperforms countries of comparable wealth on some measures, including wait times for specialist visits and hospital admission rates for uncontrolled diabetes.

    But, on a large number of measures, comparable countries outperform the United States, including life expectancy at birth; cost-related barriers to health care access; the prevalence of retained surgical items or unretrieved device fragments; and burden of disease, which takes into account years of life lost due to premature death and years of life lost to poor health or disability.

1 comment:

greg gerritt said...

And a for profit health care system undermines the entire economy.