Abstract

• Goal: Compare health system performance in 10 countries, including the United States, to glean insights for U.S. improvement.
• Methods: Analysis of 70 health system performance measures in five areas: access to care, care process, administrative efficiency, equity, and health outcomes.
• Key Findings: The top three countries are Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, although differences in overall performance between most countries are relatively small. The only clear outlier is the U.S., where health system performance is dramatically lower.
• Conclusion: The U.S. continues to be in a class by itself in the underperformance of its health care sector. While the other nine countries differ in the details of their systems and in their performance on domains, unlike the U.S., they all have found a way to meet their residents’ most basic health care needs, including universal coverage.

Introduction

Mirror, Mirror 2024 is the Commonwealth Fund’s eighth report comparing the performance of health systems in selected countries. Since the first edition in 2004, our goal has remained the same: to highlight lessons from the experiences of these nations, with special attention to how they might […]