Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. argued the United States has one of the worst health outcomes among other peer nations despite consumers paying substantially more for care.
“We spend two to three times what other countries pay for public health, and we have the worst outcomes and that’s not acceptable,” RFK Jr. said during an interview with Fox’s Dr. Marc Siegel.
He touted that in four years the country will be “even more the center of innovation around the globe” when it comes to developing drugs and certain therapies for patients.
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In its Mirror 2024 study, the Commonwealth Fund compared the performance of health systems in 10 countries, including the United States. Its findings ranked the U.S. last, trailing behind Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK, in terms of health outcomes.
It was the Commonwealth Fund’s eighth report, which aimed to highlight lessons from the experiences of these nations, with special attention to how they might inform health system improvement in the U.S.
According to the report, the differences between the other countries were “relatively small.” Comparatively, the U.S. was described as being in “a class by itself in the underperformance of its healthcare sector” given that the other nine countries “found a way to meet their residents’ most basic health care needs, including universal coverage,” the report read.
The Peterson Foundation reported that wealthier countries will spend more on healthcare than countries that are less affluent. That said, the U.S. spends nearly twice as much per capita on healthcare compared to similarly large and wealthy nations and yet, its health outcomes are not any better than those in other developed countries, according to the foundation.
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“The United States actually performs worse in some common health metrics like life expectancy, infant mortality, unmanaged diabetes, and safety during childbirth,” August 2024 Peterson Foundation report read.
The U.S. has also seen worsening measures of health outcomes since the COVID-19 pandemic too.
According to the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, life expectancy was similar in the U.S. and peer countries on average in 1980 at about 73.7 and 74.6 years, respectively. However, peer nations saw more rapid improvement in life expectancy in the following decades. The gap between the U.S. and peer nations grew even more during the pandemic. In 2022, life expectancy in the U.S. 77.5 years, while the life expectancy in comparable countries was 82.2 years on average.
There has been growing animosity against the U.S. healthcare system as consumers lambast companies for putting profits above human lives.
The entire insurance industry in particular has faced an onslaught of public scrutiny over its denials of care even before UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thomposon was gunned down outside a New York City hotel in December in what police have called a “pre-meditated, targeted attack.”
For instance, a Senate subcommittee accused UnitedHealthcare Group last fall of denying claims to a growing number of patients as it tried to leverage artificial intelligence to automate the process.
The report claimed that UnitedHealthcare’s prior authorization denial rate for post-acute care jumped from 10.9% in 2020 to 22.7% in 2022.
United refuted these claims, saying the report “mischaracterizes the Medicare Advantage program and our clinical practices.”
