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Despite spending more money per capita on healthcare than any similarly large and wealthy nation, the United States has a lower life expectancy than peer nations and has seen worsening health outcomes since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This collection combines various measures of quality of care in the United States and other large, high-income nations to show how the U.S. stacks up against its peers and how that has changed over time. While inconsistent and imperfect metrics make it difficult to firmly assess system-wide health quality, measures of long-term health outcomes, treatment outcomes, patient safety, and patient experiences suggest the U.S. health system provides lower-quality care than its peers. 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 medication or treatment errors), and patient experiences of not getting care due to cost. 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 patient safety (such as rates of post–operative sepsis).
