The health of nations

摘要

Modern medicine may be good at gauging the health of patients, but it has proved less successful at taking its own pulse. Assessing the performance of a country's health-care system is no easy task, because deciding what to include—from doctors to drugs to diet—is difficult, and because some chosen criteria, from infant mortality to patient satisfaction, are themselves hard to define. Making comparisons between countries is even trickier, because healthcare systems differ radically in their financing and organisation, and in the social goals they set out to achieve.