Answer:
Americans die younger and experience more injury and illness than people in other rich nations, despite spending almost twice as much per person on health care. That was the startling conclusion of a major report released in 2013 by the US National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM).
Since then, evidence supporting a US “health disadvantage” has only grown, with both the Journal of the American Medical Association and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention releasing new data in just the last several weeks. Headlines emphasizing Americans’ rising mortality rates are now common.
At the time of its release, the groundbreaking NRC-IOM report received widespread attention. The New York Times concluded: “It is now shockingly clear that poor health is a much broader and deeper problem than past studies have suggested.”
The report revealed the extent of the United States’s large and growing health disadvantage, which shows up as higher rates of disease and injury from birth to age 75 for men and women, rich and poor, across all races and ethnicities. The comparison countries—Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom—generally do much better, although the United Kingdom isn’t far behind the United States.
The poorer outcomes in the United States are reflected in measures as varied as infant mortality, the rate of teen pregnancy, traffic fatalities, and heart disease.
