At the most basic level, what Americans want from their health care system is "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." They want to benefit from the best of modern medicine, free from worry about medical bills and assured that they and their loved ones will have the opportunity to be healthy and productive.
The reality is starkly different. In the United States, life expectancy at birth for men is 74.5 years, a year less than the average across all industrialized nations and four years less than the average in the best-performing country.
(2) Women in the United States, with a life expectancy of 79.9 years at birth, live longer than men yet similarly fall one year behind the average for women in industrialized nations and five years behind the best-performing country. These differences cannot be attributed solely to variations outside the health system, such as our relatively high poverty rate. A Commonwealth Fund international working group on quality indicators finds that the United States falls behind other countries on the quality of health care delivered in a number of areas.
(3) New Zealand has much better five-year survival rates for colorectal cancer, for example, and Canada has better five-year survival rates after kidney transplantation.
High performance health care is essential not only to the health of Americans but also to their economic productivity. A report by the National Committee for Quality Assurance found that improving the performance of all health plans to the level of the best-performing plans would reduce the number of deaths by between 39,280 and 83,600 each year, save between $2.8 billion and $4.2 billion in medical care costs, avoid 83 million sick days, and increase productivity by $13.5 billion.
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