Evaluating the US Healthcare Systems Performance Across Global Dimensions

Abstract

Healthcare System Healthcare systems seek to formulate structures that make it easier to access health insurance and protect vulnerable populations. Marginalized groups and low-income individuals are exposed to challenges accessing medical services leading to worse healthcare outcomes compared to the general population. When comparing healthcare systems around the world, identifying the performance of countries in the five major dimensions sheds light on the rankings for each country (Butkus et al., 2020). The dimensions include the care process, access, administrative efficiency, equity, and health care outcomes. Care access is the most important dimension for a healthcare system since it considers the affordability and timeliness of delivering medical services to members of the population. It is the measure that indicates the capacity of a healthcare system to serve the needs of the target community or population. Consequently, the performance of the United States in this dimension is important in determining how the nation’s system meets the expectations of the community. While Netherlands performed the best in this measure, the United States had the least population. Legislation on the provision of healthcare insurance played major roles in the performance of each of the two countries in this dimension. While the United States has experienced changes in healthcare laws, it is yet to meet the expectations of its population regarding access to care. This paper will evaluate the United States healthcare system in relation to the rest of the world and changes arising from the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and law’s reforms since 2010. The five dimensions of care facilitate the comparison of healthcare systems to establish their capacity to meet the needs of their consumers. Access to care encompasses the affordability and the timeliness of delivering care to patients in a country. Factors affecting this dimension include the cost of care and the decisions of patients not to seek medical services as a result of financial difficulties. The care process dimension refers to the capacity of healthcare systems to deliver safe, coordinated, and preventive care to their patients (The Commonwealth Fund, 2021). The administrative efficiency dimension seeks to assess the availability of physicians for patients and the amount of time and effort the patients and caregivers spend during the delivery of health services in different countries. Equity is a valuable dimension that establishes the variation between the services that the higher and lower-income patients receive in hospitals. The goal of the dimension is to minimize the gap in healthcare delivery among individuals in different social classes. On healthcare outcomes, the dimension measures factors that indicate the effectiveness of healthcare systems in meeting the needs of the patients such as lowering the incidence of chronic diseases and the burden of mortality in the target population. Ranking the United States healthcare system against other nations indicates the measures the country would take to improve healthcare delivery. The dimension of healthcare that I find most important is the access to care in a country (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023). A healthcare system that emphasizes on affordability and the timeliness of care delivery would meet the expectations of the majority of patients. The Netherlands performed the best in this dimension since their government plays a major role in ensuring that the healthcare system accommodates majority of the country’s population. While the country has universal healthcare coverage, the government requires that adults acquire their private basic insurance (Ham & Brommels, 2019). The structure of the healthcare system seeks to increase the access to healthcare insurance among all members of the population. The United States achieved the least in the access to healthcare dimension since there is a high population of Americans with no insurance coverage. Uninsured and underinsured people are the most likely to face challenges in affordability and timeliness of care (Yabroff et al., 2019). The country’s healthcare system makes it challenging to access healthcare services for a significant proportion of Americans. Measures to raise the performance of the country in this measure should take priority in reforms to increase the effectiveness of the healthcare system in the United States. An important component of the PPACA is the introduction of health insurance reforms that restructure coverage to increase access to health services. In addition to the exiting laws, PPACA increases the protection of Americans to ensure that they have...