A new national scorecard from The Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System finds that the U.S. healthcare 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 United States overall continues to fall far short on key indicators of health outcomes and quality, with particularly low scores on efficiency.
In the report, Why Not The Best? Results From The National Scorecard on U.S. Health System Performance, 2008, the United States scored an average of 65 out of a possible 100 across 37 key indicators of health outcomes, quality, access, efficiency, and equity--slightly below the overall score in the 2006 scorecard. Even more troubling, the health system is on the wrong track when it comes to access and affordability. The number of uninsured and underinsured continues to rise. 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.
However, 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. Download the report.
