How has the health of our healthcare system changed over the last three years?

The Commonwealth Fund has updated its 2007 study which compared the US system to that of six other developed countries. And the results are just as embarrassing.

The short version is: “Americans spend twice as much as residents of other developed countries on healthcare, but get lower quality, less efficiency and have the least equitable system”.

The United States ranked last when compared to six other countries — Britain, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, the Commonwealth Fund report found.
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Previous reports by the nonprofit fund, which conducts research into healthcare performance and promotes changes in the U.S. system, have been heavily used by policymakers and politicians pressing for healthcare reform.
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The current report uses data from nationally representative patient and physician surveys in seven countries in 2007, 2008, and 2009. It is available here (sic)

In 2007, health spending was $7,290 per person in the United States, more than double that of any other country in the survey.

Australians spent $3,357, Canadians $3,895, Germans $3,588, the Netherlands $3,837 and Britons spent $2,992 per capita on health in 2007. New Zealand spent the least at $2,454.

This is a big rise from the Fund’s last similar survey, in 2007, which found Americans spent $6,697 per capita on healthcare in 2005, or 16 percent of gross domestic product.

“We rank last on safety and do poorly on several dimensions of quality,” (Cathy Schoen, one of the authors of the report) told reporters. “We do particularly poorly on going without care because of cost. And we also do surprisingly poorly on access to primary care and after-hours care.”
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The report looks at five measures of healthcare — quality, efficiency, access to care, equity and the ability to lead long, healthy, productive lives.

Britain, whose nationalized healthcare system was widely derided by opponents of U.S. healthcare reform, ranks first in quality while the Netherlands ranked first overall on all scores, the Commonwealth team found.
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Every other system covers all its citizens, the report noted and said the U.S. system, which leaves 46 million Americans or 15 percent of the population without health insurance, is the most unfair.

“The lower the performance score for equity, the lower the performance on other measures. This suggests that, when a country fails to meet the needs of the most vulnerable, it also fails to meet the needs of the average citizen,” the report reads.

Let’s hope that three years from now, the post-reform US healthcare system will show some improvement.

Meanwhile, I find it hard to buy the report’s claim that the increase in per-capita health spending in the US from $6,697 in 2005 to $7,290 in 2007 represents “a big rise“. Elementary ‘rithmetic reveals that to be an increase of only 4.3% per year. Which actually comes as a rather pleasant surprise. I thought our health spending was supposed to be galloping along at a much faster clip.

What is all the more striking is that the annual rate of inflation for this two year period is 3%. Health spending didn’t really rise that much faster than inflation. Who would have thunk?