martes, 24 de marzo de 2009

HEALTH CARE

Health care in the United States is provided by many separate legal entities. Including private and public spending, more is spent per person on health care in the United States than in any other nation in the world. A study of international health care spending levels published in the health policy journal Health Affairs in the year 2000, found that while the U.S. spends more on health care than other countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the use of health care services in the U.S. is below the OECD median by most measures. The authors of the study concluded that the prices paid for health care services are much higher in the U.S. In 1996, 5% of the population accounted for more than half of all costs.
Active debate over health care reform in the United States concerns questions of a right to health care, access, fairness, efficiency, cost, and quality. The World Health Organization (WHO), in 2000, ranked the U.S. health care system as the highest in cost, first in responsiveness, 37th in overall performance, and 72nd by overall level of health (among 191 member nations included in the study).The WHO study has been criticized in a study published in Health Affairs for its methodology and lack of correlation with user satisfaction ratings. A 2008 report by the Commonwealth Fund ranked the United States last in the quality of health care among the 19 compared countries. However, the U.S. is a leader in medical innovation, with three times higher per-capita spending than Europe. The U.S. also has higher survival rates than most other countries for certain conditions, such as cancer.
As a proportion of GDP, public health care spending in the United States is larger than in most other large Western countries. On top of that, there is substantial expenditure paid from private insurances. According to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the United States is the "only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not ensure that all citizens have coverage" (i.e. some kind of insurance).


SOURCE: wikipedia

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