Wheres Americas high-value health system?
As Peggy Lee crooned in 1969 , “Is that all there is?” That song could be the theme for the resulting health policy that took a gestational year to produce. Changes for the health insurance industry, more uninsured with access to health insurance and raising taxes to pay for these policies are in the morphing recipe for reform. But what happened to achieving better value for the U.S. health dollar? What about becoming a resilient, high-performance health system, as The Commonwealth Fund envisions? An intriguing graph published in the National Geographic blog tells a succinct tale. It organizes health spending and utilization data collected by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) along with life expectancy for the most developed countries in the world. The graph illustrates that, while the U.S. spent $7,290 per capita on health in 2007, life expectancy that year was about 78 years. In contrast, higher performing health systems such as Japan spent $2,581 per
