Studies Show US Spending Doesn't Get Best Health
The United States may spend twice as much on health care as other rich countries but it is not getting results to match, according to studies released on Tuesday.
But in the study of five wealthy countries, published in the journal Health Affairs, researchers found no single nation had clearly the worst or best health care system.
Gerard Anderson at Johns Hopkins University's school of public health and colleagues came up with a list of 21 health fields they could evenly compare across the five countries — Australia, Canada, Britain, New Zealand and the United States.
"None of the five countries is consistently the best or the worst on all 21 indicators," Anderson said during a telephone briefing for reporters.
"If you are looking for the place to get the best care, there isn't a single place. Every country has at least one indicator where it scores the best of the five countries and each country has at least one indicator where it scores the worst of the five countries."
But, he said, the United States is not getting value for money. "The United States should be particularly concerned about these results, given that we spend twice as much on health care as any other country. So spending more doesn't necessarily result in better outcomes."
Anderson's group of international health experts sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund spent five years working on the study, getting the latest possible data from the five countries on areas such as breast cancer and leukemia survival, suicide rates, death rates from asthma, vaccination rates and cancer screening.
The US spends twice as much on health care as other rich countries.

A. Right
B. Wrong
C. Not mentioned