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Second national scorecard on US health care system finds no overall improvement |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: A new national scorecard from The Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System finds that the U.S. health care system has failed to improve overall and that scores on access have declined significantly since the first national scorecard in 2006. Despite spending more on health care than any other industrialized nation, the U.S. overall continues to fall far short on key indicators of health outcomes and quality, with particularly low scores on efficiency. As of 2007, 42 percent of all working age adults were either uninsured or underinsured---up from 35 percent in the four years since 2003. The U.S. also failed to keep up with improvements made in other countries, falling from 15th to last among 19 industrialized nations when it comes to premature deaths that could potentially have been prevented by timely access to effective health care. In addition to scoring poorly on indicators compared to other countries, performance varies greatly from state to state, region to region, and across hospitals and health plans. Even though the report finds that the health care system often lost ground or failed to improve, there is also evidence that focusing on specific areas through national initiatives can yield substantial improvement. For example, hospital standardized mortality ratios, a key indicator of patient safety, improved by 19 percent over five years, following broad public and private efforts to assess and improve hospital safety. Thirty-seven million more adults would have an accessible primary care provider, and 70 million more adults would receive all recommended preventive care.
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