How does the quality of the U.S. health care system compare to other countries?

This chart collection compares the United States and other large, high-income nations across various measures of care quality to show how the U.S. stacks up against its peers and how that has changed over time.

Generally, the U.S. performs worse in long-term health outcomes measures (such as life expectancy), certain treatment outcomes (such as maternal mortality and congestive heart failure hospital admissions), some patient safety measures (such as obstetric trauma with instrument and medication or treatment errors), and patient experiences of not getting care due to cost. The U.S. performs similarly to or better than peer nations in some other measures of treatment outcomes (such as mortality rates within 30 days of acute hospital treatment) and patient safety (such as rates of post-operative sepsis).

The chart collection is part of the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, an online information hub dedicated to monitoring and assessing the performance of the U.S. health system.

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