As Republicans sit on the precipice of fumbling what will likely be their one opportunity to repeal and replace America's failed Obamacare experiment, a new study just released by The Commonwealth Fund found that the U.S., despite spending more money per capita than any other country on the planet, has the worst healthcare system in the developed world.
The Commonwealth Fund focused on evaluating five main areas of the healthcare system, including care process, access, administrative efficiency, equity and health care outcomes and analyzed 72 indicators within those fields. Of the 11 countries included in the study, the U.S. ranked dead last by a fairly staggering margin.
The United States spends far more on health care than other high-income countries, with spending levels that rose continuously over the past three decades (Exhibit 1). Yet the U.S. population has poorer health than other countries.
Timely and accessible health care could mitigate many of these challenges, but the U.S. health care system falls short, failing to deliver indicated services reliably to all who could benefit. In particular, poor access to primary care has contributed to inadequate prevention and management of chronic diseases, delayed diagnoses, incomplete adherence to treatments, wasteful overuse of drugs and technologies, and coordination and safety problems.
Even worse, aside from "care process," which tracks metrics related to preventative care and consistent engagement with the same family doctor over long periods of time, the U.S. scored last (or thereabouts) in every single category of the study.
Adding insult to injury, these poor results come despite the fact that America spends roughly 60% more on healthcare, as a percentage of GDP, than the other countries in the study...
...a metric that will only get worse when the study is updated again in 3 years as we've recently shown that healthcare premiums have surge roughly 100% since 2013 (note that the cost portion of this latest study ended with data collected in 2014).
Can anyone spot the outlier?
But sure, we should probably just leave everything as is...Obamacare seems to be working just fine.