Health Care in the U.S. Compared to Other High-Income Countries: Worst Outcomes

The Commonwealth Fund

Mirror, Mirror 2021: Reflecting Poorly

Originally posted 4 Aug 21

Introduction

No two nations are alike when it comes to health care. Over time, each country has settled on a unique mix of policies, service delivery systems, and financing models that work within its resource constraints. Even among high-income nations that have the option to spend more on health care, approaches often vary substantially. These choices affect health system performance in terms of access to care, patients’ experiences with health care, and people’s health outcomes. In this report, we compare the health systems of 11 high-income countries as a means to generate insights about the policies and practices that are associated with superior performance.

With the COVID-19 pandemic imposing an unprecedented stress test on the health care and public health systems of all nations, such a comparison is especially germane. Success in controlling and preventing infection and disease has varied greatly. The same is true of countries’ ability to address the challenges that the pandemic has presented to the workforce, operations, and financial stability of the organizations delivering care. And while the comparisons we draw are based on data collected prior to the pandemic or during the earliest months of the crisis, the prepandemic strengths and weaknesses of each country’s preexisting arrangements for health care and public health have undoubtedly been shaping its experience throughout the crisis.

For our assessment of health care system performance in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we used indicators available across five domains:

• Access to care
• Care process
• Administrative efficiency
• Equity
• Health care outcomes

For more information on these performance domains and their component measures, see How We Measured Performance. Most of the data were drawn from surveys examining how members of the public and primary care physicians experience health care in their respective countries. These Commonwealth Fund surveys were conducted by SSRS in collaboration with partner organizations in the 10 other countries. Additional data were drawn from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

The info is here.

How Winning Leads to Cheating

By Jordana Cepelewicz
Scientific American
Originally published on February 2, 2016

We live, for better or for worse, in a competition-driven world. Rivalry powers our economy, sparks technological innovation and encourages academic discovery. But it also compels people to manipulate the system and commit crimes. Some figure it’s just easier—and even acceptable—to cheat.

But what if instead of examining how people behave in a competitive setting, we wanted to understand the consequences of competition on their everyday behavior? That is exactly what Amos Schurr, a business and management professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and Ilana Ritov, a psychologist at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discuss in a study in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “How can it be,” Schurr asks, “that successful, distinguished people—take [former New York State Gov.] Eliot Spitzer, who I think was a true civil servant when he started out his career with good intentions—turn corrupt? At the same time, you have other successful people, like Mother Theresa, who don’t become corrupt. What distinguishes between these two types of successful people?”

The article is here.