International Comparisons
See also: Health systems by countryHealth systems can vary substantially from country to country, and in the last few years, comparisons have been made on an international basis. The World Health Organization, in its World Health Report 2000, provided a ranking of health systems around the world according to criteria of the overall level and distribution of health in the populations, and the responsiveness and fair financing of health care services. The goals for health systems, according to the WHO's World Health Report 2000 - Health systems: improving performance (WHO, 2000), are good health, responsiveness to the expectations of the population, and fair financial contribution. There have been several debates around the results of this WHO exercise, and especially based on the country ranking linked to it, insofar as it appeared to depend mostly on the choice of the retained indicators.
Direct comparisons of health statistics across nations are complex. The Commonwealth Fund, in its annual survey, "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall", compares the performance of the health systems in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and the U.S. Its 2007 study found that, although the U.S. system is the most expensive, it consistently underperforms compared to the other countries. A major difference between the U.S. and the other countries in the study is that the U.S. is the only country without universal health care. The OECD also collects comparative statistics, and has published brief country profiles.
| Country | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Australia | 81.4 | 4.2 | 57 | 2.8 | 10.1 | 3,353 | 8.5 | 17.7 | 67.5 |
| Canada | 81.4 | 5.2 | 77 | 2.2 | 9.0 | 3,844 | 10.0 | 16.7 | 70.2 |
| France | 81.0 | 3.5 | 55 | 3.3 | 7.7 | 3,679 | 11.0 | 14.2 | 78.3 |
| Germany | 79.8 | 3.7 | 76 | 3.5 | 10.5 | 3,724 | 10.4 | 17.6 | 76.4 |
| Italy | 80.5 | 3.5 | 60 | 4.2 | 6.1 | 2,771 | 8.7 | 14.1 | 76.6 |
| Japan | 82.6 | 2.6 | 61 | 2.1 | 9.4 | 2,750 | 8.2 | 16.8 | 80.4 |
| Norway | 80.0 | 3.0 | 64 | 3.8 | 16.2 | 4,885 | 8.9 | 17.9 | 84.1 |
| Sweden | 81.0 | 2.5 | 61 | 3.6 | 10.8 | 3,432 | 8.9 | 13.6 | 81.4 |
| UK | 80.1 | 4.9 | 83 | 2.5 | 9.5 | 3,051 | 8.4 | 15.8 | 81.3 |
| USA | 78.1 | 6.8 | 96 | 2.4 | 10.6 | 7,437 | 16.0 | 18.5 | 45.1 |
Physicians and hospital beds per 1000 inhabitants vs Health Care Spending in 2008 for OECD Countries. The data source is http://www.oecd.org.
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