Best Health Care System in the World
When moving abroad, the quality of a country’s healthcare system should be taken into account. Whether coming from the US or another location, checking that your new locale has an advanced and reliable healthcare system provides peace of mind that all treatments will be covered by international health insurance.
The Top Healthcare Systems Around the World
Each nation has its own unique policies, service delivery models and financing strategies for providing healthcare. Even among high-income nations with more resources to spend on health care, approaches can differ considerably.
Achieving the highest standard of health care requires countries to provide efficient, cost-effective, and equitable services for all their citizens. To do this, governments must combine policy and practice innovations with resource constraints in order to maximize value delivered by the health care system.
When measuring a country’s overall health care system performance, several elements come into play; access to and affordability of care, how well the system coordinates care for patients and their families, as well as its efficiency at reducing paperwork, administrative burdens, and bureaucratic delays in getting the right care when it’s needed. Some countries boast the highest levels of performance across these domains while others have lower ones.
For instance, the United States has the lowest level of coordination of care among all 11 high-income countries studied in this report. Only 91% of Americans with chronic or serious illnesses had regular doctors to manage their healthcare, compared to 99 percent in countries such as the Netherlands, France, Norway, Switzerland and the U.K.
Another significant indicator of a country’s healthcare system is its capacity to reduce cost-based barriers, such as waitlists for medical procedures. Countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, Denmark and Norway boast the highest levels of access to care based on these metrics, while Canada ranks lowest.
It’s essential to note that some of the world’s best healthcare systems can be found outside countries with socialized medicine, like South Korea. While their private sector is vibrant, much of their healthcare is still provided by government-run facilities.
No matter their approach, successful nations have prioritized reducing cost-based barriers to healthcare – like waitlists and wait times that can impede access for poorer Americans. Furthermore, they have worked on making the system more user-friendly so people can navigate it more easily, while setting in place incentives to drive innovation that enhances patient quality of care and experience.
In addition to these factors, a country’s health care system is also affected by government spending on it and other aspects of economic development such as demographic and labor force trends. For instance, while the US spends more per person on national healthcare than any major industrialized nation in this report, it ranks last in administrative efficiency — that is, how quickly paperwork related to insurance claims or other healthcare costs is completed.
