U.S. Health Care System Needs Improvement on Affordability and Access October 19, 2011 News, Public Health Commonwealth Fund, National Scorecard on U.S. Health System Performa 0 The U.S. health care system is faltering in areas such as affordability and access even as it gets more expensive, according to the third comprehensive scorecard issued by the Commonwealth Fund, one of the country’s biggest health care foundations. After looking at 42 indicators of health care quality, access, cost, and other values, the fund gave the U.S. a score of 64 out of 100. The scorecard primarily looked at data from 2007 to 2009, before the health care law was adopted last year, and thus is more of a benchmark of where the country was at the end of the last decade than how it is currently doing. Many of its measures have been reported elsewhere or are well known, such as the rising cost of health insurance. Still, the scorecard provides a rare, big-picture assessment of all the ways the country’s health care system is failing or underperforming, as well as a few ways it has gotten better and areas where it has the most room to grow. The scorecard found improvements in how well adults got their high blood pressure under control, and how well hospitals were doing in preventing surgical complications and treating heart attacks, heart failure and pneumonia. But it also found an increase in hospitalizations of nursing home patients and shortcomings in the ability of sick adults to quickly get to a doctor without going to the emergency room. It also concluded that the U.S. does dismally in terms of how efficiently it uses health care resources, avoids wasteful treatments, limits administrative costs and uses electronic medical records. Click here to read the executive summary of the National Scorecard on U.S. Health System Performance, 2011. Source: Kaiser Health News, October 18, 2011. Comments are closed.
