How does the quality of the U.S. health system compare to other countries?

The United States spends nearly twice as much per capita on healthcare compared to peer wealthy nations and has a lower life expectancy than peer nations. 

This chart collection combines various measures of quality of care in the United States and other high-income nations (based on total and per capita GDP) to show how the U.S. compares against its peers and how that has changed over time. Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK are included in this analysis.  

Generally, the U.S. performs worse in long-term health outcomes measures (such as life expectancy), certain treatment outcomes (such as maternal mortality and congestive heart failure hospital admissions), some patient safety measures (such as obstetric trauma with instrument), and health system capacity (such as rate of general practitioners). The U.S. performs similarly to or better than peer nations in other measures of treatment outcomes (such as mortality rates within 30 days of acute hospital treatment) and some patient safety measures (such as post-operative complications).   

The U.S. health system appears to perform worse than peer nations on more indicators than it does better. However, inconsistent and imperfect metrics make it difficult to firmly assess system-wide health quality. Some measures of quality – especially long-term measures, like life expectancy – are not only reflective of the health system itself, but also of differences in socioeconomic conditions and population behaviors that are largely outside of the domain of the health system. 

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