World rankings of healthcare

[Guest GusK]

With the current debate on private versus public control of healthcare I found these rankings (if valid) pretty interesting:

 

1. 2000 rankings:

www.photius.com/rankings/...ranks.html

 

2. 2001 rankings:

 

society.guardian.co.uk/nh...96,00.html

 

The criteria and discussion of overall results can be found at:

 

dll.umaine.edu/ble/U.S.%20HCweb.pdf

 

If these rankings are valid, it does seem to offer evidence for a public or state-run healthcare system. For instance, compare the European and Canadian(stronger publicly-run system) versus US (greater privatization) rankings:

 

-------------------------------------------------------

society.guardian.co.uk/nh...33,00.html

 

The British are beating themselves up yet again over their apparently lamentable performance in global competition - this time it concerns coming "only" 24th in the World Health Organisation (WHO) league table of health efficiency.

Cue hand-wringing over the woeful state of the NHS, and anguish and shame that Andorra, San Marino and the Solomon Islands are supposedly healthier than the UK. But perhaps things aren't really so bad. Take the US for example. It spends a massive 14% of its national wealth on healthcare - roughly as much as the UK and Japan put together. And yet it clocks in at a mere 72 in the WHO's ranking of 191 healthy countries.

 

That's below Cuba (ranked 36); El Salvador (37); Grenada (49); Columbia (51); Iran (58) ; Bosnia Herzegovina (70), and only a nose ahead of Nicaragua (74) and Iraq (75).

 

The US may have - for the wealthy few - the best and most modern healthcare that money can buy, but for all its huge investment (both state funding and through insurance) it signally fails to turn expenditure into health. What the WHO study tells us is that simply throwing money at health does not in itself produce results in terms of the general physical and wellbeing of a population (measured by life expectancy, infant mortality and so on).

 

So while the US spends roughly two-and-a-half times as much per head on health than the UK, its general health outcomes are no better, and often poorer. In the US, seven babies in every 1,000 die during birth - the same as in the UK. Both countries have halved infant mortality in recent years (from 14 per 1,000 live births in 1978) . But while US health spending doubled over that period, UK spending increased only marginally, suggesting that the NHS is much more efficient.

 

-------------------------------------------------------

[Guest Unknown </username> <dateline>1118447280</dateline> <title>Unknown</title> <pagetext>(This]

(This post is missing and can not be restored)</pagetext>

</post>

<post>

<thread>N</thread>

<threadtitle>World rankings of healthcare</threadtitle>

<threadviews>0</threadviews>

<threadsticky>0</threadsticky>

<poll></poll>

<username>

 

Unknown

 

 

</username>

<dateline>1118447280</dateline>

<title>Unknown</title>

<pagetext>(This post is missing and can not be restored)

[Guest Unknown </username> <dateline>1118447280</dateline> <title>Unknown</title> <pagetext>(This]

(This post is missing and can not be restored)</pagetext>

</post>

<post>

<thread>N</thread>

<threadtitle>World rankings of healthcare</threadtitle>

<threadviews>0</threadviews>

<threadsticky>0</threadsticky>

<poll></poll>

<username>

 

Unknown

 

 

</username>

<dateline>1118447280</dateline>

<title>Unknown</title>

<pagetext>(This post is missing and can not be restored)