[afro-nets] Health Affairs: New Scorecard Says That Much Improvement Is Needed in U.S. Health Care System

["Kathleen Ford" <kford@projecthope.org>]

Health Affairs: New Scorecard Says That Much Improvement Is Needed in U.S. Health Care System
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Despite spending 16 percent of its gross domestic product on health care -- double the median for industrialized nations -- the U.S. remains the only industrialized country in the world that does not guarantee universal coverage. It is not a leader in the adoption of health information technology, and it achieves neither the best outcomes nor the best quality of care when compared to other nations.

So report Cathy Schoen and her colleagues at the Commonwealth Fund in a new article published today on the Health Affairs Web site. Schoen's article describes the scores earned by the nation's health care system on a new national scorecard developed by Commonwealth. The scorecard, "which was designed to assess and monitor all key dimensions of performance in relationship to benchmarks and over time, provides a unique whole-system view," the authors explain. The total U.S. average score across all categories was 66 out of a possible 100.

You can read the article by Schoen and her Commonwealth Fund colleagues at 

http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/hlthaff.25.w457

Health Affairs is pleased to make this article freely accessible to listserv members for two weeks.

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Kathleen Ford
mailto:kford@projecthope.org