‘An Embarrassment’: U.S. Health Care Far from the Top in Global Study

Americans grumble all the time about the quality of our health-care system, but when we're dealing with serious issues, such as injuries from an auto accident or cancer, we often count our blessings that we live in a wealthy country that has well-trained doctors with access to the latest medical technology. Yet those factors don't always correlate with staying alive. That's the distressing finding from a global study of what researchers call “amenable mortality,” or deaths that theoretically could have been avoided by timely and effective medical care.

Christopher Murray, a researcher at the University of Washington, and his collaborators looked at 32 causes of death in 195 countries from 1990 to 2015 to create a health-care quality index they used for rankings. Murray described the findings as “disturbing.” The top country on their list is Andorra, the microstate in the Pyrenees mountains with a population of about 85,000 and an economy is based on tourism. The lowest is the Central African Republic, the landlocked country in the middle of the continent where violence by armed groups against the civilian population has broken out in recent days.

As might be expected, many highly developed nations, such as Norway, Australia and Canada, scored well. Those in more-remote areas in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean scored poorly. In the map below, the higher the health-care quality index, or HAQ, the better the level of care, according to the study. The world's superpower doesn't rank where you might expect it to. The United States scores an 80 on the index, which is at the bottom of the second decile and puts it on par with Estonia and Montenegro...