New England Journal of Medicine: "The Failing U.S. Health System"

It should come as a shock to no one that our health care "system" is only a "system" in the loosest sense of the word. "System" implies a set of common goals, a comprehensive design, and coordination of effort toward achieving the system's purposes. The result is about what you would expect with a largely profit-based set of arrangements among participants who are often working at cross-purposes.

The recent report from the Commonwealth Fund ("Mirror, Mirror 2024: A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System") paints a dismal picture. The website has the report and useful chartpacks in PowerPoint and PDF. Here's the executive summary:

• Goal: Compare health system performance in 10 countries, including the United States, to glean insights for U.S. improvement.
• Methods: Analysis of 70 health system performance measures in five areas: access to care, care process, administrative efficiency, equity, and health outcomes.
• Key Findings: The top three countries are Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, although differences in overall performance between most countries are relatively small. The only clear outlier is the U.S., where health system performance is dramatically lower.
• Conclusion: The U.S. continues to be in a class by itself in the underperformance of its health care sector. While the other nine countries differ in the details of their systems and in their performance on domains, unlike the U.S., they all have found a way to meet their residents’ most basic health care needs, including universal coverage.

Three of the authors provide an expanded version of this abstract in this week's edition of the New England Journal of Medicine (apparently for free). Here are some of the main points:

• We can be proud of our process for delivering care. Compared to nine peer countries, we are ranked #2, quite close behind New Zealand.
• But the cost of this care is astronomically high and the results place our health outcomes dead last among this peer group:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• "Many of the U.S. health system’s shortfalls result from persistent economic barriers to obtaining essential care. The Affordable Care Act and related policies reduced the proportion of uninsured people to its current level of 7 to 8%. But 26 million Americans still lack insurance. . . . Substantial progress toward this goal could be made by building on existing programs, such as the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, and Medicaid." Note to self: This strategy requires political will and adequate financing at the state and federal levels. I'm not optimistic.
• "The U.S. health care delivery system has profound problems that result in huge inefficiencies and excessive costs that would limit the benefits of expanded coverage. One such problem is the country’s worsening shortage of primary care clinicians . . . . Improved compensation and reductions in administrative burdens for primary care clinicians would help the health system recruit and retain such clinicians and build desperately needed capacity." See Note to self above.
• "A second delivery-system failure is the high prices charged by U.S. health care facilities and professionals, which far exceed prices in other health systems. These high prices largely account for the extraordinary costs of care in the United States, which would make expanded coverage less affordable and which drive employers, who purchase insurance for more than half of Americans younger than 65 years of age, to impose high deductibles and copayments." The authors suggest scrutiny of the extensive consolidation of providers -- institutional and individual -- underway. But: The the premium-price train left the station far earlier than the consolidation boom. Consolidation may be exacerbating the problem, but the problem goes back decades, is cultural,  and it runs deep.
• "Improvements in coverage and the delivery system will need to be complemented by policies targeting critical influences on health outside the health sector. The United States lags behind comparator countries when it comes to addressing the social determinants of health, such as poverty, homelessness, inequality, and hunger. . . . The toll of gun violence in the United States also demands policy attention." See Note to self above.

This report gives us a good differential diagnosis and then prescribes the policy equivalent of "lose weight, exercise more, cut back on meat and dairy, reduce stress in your life, and start getting enough sleep." We all know this is the Path to Enlightenment (or at least to health maintenance), but how many patients take this advice?