U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health.

摘要

The United States spends much more money on health care than any other country. Yet Americans die sooner and experience more illness than residents in many other countries. While the length of life has improved in the United States, other countries have gained life years even faster, and our relative standing in the world has fallen over the past half century. What accounts for the paradoxical combination in the United States of relatively great wealth and high spending on health care with relatively poor health status and lower life expectancy. That is the question posed to the panel that produced this report, U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health. The group included experts in medicine, epidemiology, and demography and other fields in the social sciences. They scrutinized the relevant data and studies to discern the nature and scope of the U.S. disadvantage, to explore potential explanations, and to point the way toward improving the nations health performance. The report identifies a number of misconceptions about the causes of the nations relatively poor performance.