Which Country Has the World's Best Health Care?

by Ezekiel J. Emanuel

Overview

The preeminent doctor and health policy expert Ezekiel J. Emanuel gives an incisive tour of eleven health care systems across the globe, including our own, in search of whose is best—and how we can be more like them.

One thing we can all agree on: the United States does not have the world’s best health care, at least not for all its citizens across fifty very different states. But which country does, and what can they teach the US?

After analyzing the US and ten other countries—Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the UK—the results are in. No health care system is perfect, whether the problem is too many hospital beds in Germany or treating chronic illness in France, and some problems are shared across many countries, from addressing mental health care to containing the rising costs of chronic care. 

With a new coda that examines the handling of COVID-19 around the world, Dr. Emanuel offers evidence of the flaws and triumphs of health systems in the US and globally, and the lessons we can learn from each other.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541797758
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	03/22/2022
Pages:	512
Sales rank:	323,326
Product dimensions:	5.55(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Ezekiel J. Emanuel is the Vice Provost for Global Initiatives, the Diane v.S. Levy and Robert M. Levy University Professor, and Chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. Dr. Emanuel was the founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health and held that position until August of 2011. Until January 2011, he served as a Special Advisor on Health Policy to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget and National Economic Council. He is a breast oncologist and author of several books, including Healthcare Guaranteed and Reinventing American Healthcare (both PublicAffairs).

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 United States 18

2 Canada 55

3 United Kingdom 83

4 Norway 115

5 France 143

6 Germany 169

7 Netherlands 197

8 Switzerland 229

9 Australia 261

10 Taiwan 300

11 China 324

12 Who's the Best? 351

13 Conclusion 385

Coda: Coronavirus and the Performance of Health Care Systems 406

Acknowledgments 412

Glossary of Acronyms 415

Recommended Reading 422

Index 432

About the Author 453

Editorial Reviews

"Valuable... It's hard to imagine anyone better suited to rank the world's health care systems than an oncologist with a Harvard medical degree and a Harvard Ph.D. in political philosophy who was deeply involved in crafting the Affordable Care Act and currently chairs the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania."—The New York Review of Books

From the Publisher

06/01/2020

Oncologist and bioethicist Emanuel has worked extensively in the fields of U.S. health care ethics and public policy. Here he collects, collates, and analyzes specific data to answer the popular question of who has the best health care. He acknowledges similar ranking exercises done by others, but notes that many have been unsuccessful and are now dated. Countries considered include the United States, UK, Taiwan, Switzerland, Canada, China, Norway, France, Germany, Netherlands, and Australia. Each country is evaluated by the history of its health care system, current coverage model, financing, payment processes, delivery of services, pharmaceutical coverage and price controls, human resources, and challenges. Yet arguably, there can be no overall best—each area of comparison is not consistently measured, and areas of priority are different in each country; better or worse, or rather best for whom, would be preferable. There are also six tips for improving the U.S. health care system, and a last-minute COVID-19 coda. VERDICT This unique, evidence-based book points to data that can be used as a starting point for more policy research and would be a solid purchase for public policy collections, as well as academic health and public libraries.—Elizabeth J. Eastwood, Los Alamos, NM

Library Journal

2020-04-13
A leading oncologist and medical ethicist turns a gimlet eye on the health care systems of the world’s leading economies and finds most of them wanting.

Where’s the best place in the world to be sick? To judge by Emanuel’s findings, if you have a condition that will allow you to live awhile, the U.S. isn’t bad; it leads the world in medical innovations and finding cures or treatments for unusual ailments. By other measures, the U.S. ranks well down the list of the 11 systems he analyzes here: “It significantly underperforms on numerous dimensions,” writes the author. China may be worse, in part because its system of health care is hospital-centric: “There are vanishingly few physician offices or other ambulatory centers to deliver care.” Consequently, with the current COVID-19 crisis, Chinese people needing treatment flooded the country’s hospitals and overwhelmed them. In many parts of that country, Emanuel writes, hospitals are few and far between, forcing patients to travel far from home for treatment. Canadians have it better except in the remoter reaches of the far north; Emanuel acknowledges that Canadian health care has its problems even while noting that conservative critics in the U.S. have vastly overestimated the problem of waiting times for treatment. Britain’s system is worse but not terrible. The author offers numerous methods for improving systems around the world. Some may be unpalatable to libertarian advocates of privacy. For example, Taiwan was able to keep a lid, relatively speaking, on COVID-19, because medical data are centralized with passports and other key documents, so that it was easy to identify Taiwanese who had visited mainland China and test and, if necessary, quarantine them. Among Emanuel’s recommendations are to provide universal coverage, simplify data flows and insurance programs, and regulate drug prices—which are sky-high in the U.S.

Students of health economics and policymakers will find the doctor’s diagnoses and prescriptions well worth considering.

Kirkus Reviews