Many people are glad 2020 is behind us, but significant problems remain for the United States. Recent studies show the country trails several other developed nations in health care quality, COVID-19 death rate, income inequality, social and economic mobility, and corruption.
Using data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) relative to 10 other high-income countries, the Commonwealth Fund finds:
- The U.S. spends more on health care as a share of the economy — nearly twice as much as the average OECD country — yet has the lowest life expectancy and highest suicide rates among the 11 nations.
- The U.S. has the highest chronic disease burden and an obesity rate that is two times higher than the OECD average.
- Americans had fewer physician visits than peers in most countries, which may be related to a low supply of physicians in the U.S.
- Compared to peer nations, the U.S. has among the highest number of hospitalizations from preventable causes and the highest rate of avoidable deaths.
Health Policy Watch reports that “along with recording the most deaths from COVID-19 of any country in the world, the U.S. has ranked highest among leading OECD countries in deaths per capita from the infectious disease, according to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) by researchers from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania.”
Income inequality in the U.S. is the highest of all the G7 nations, according to data from the OECD. Additionally, the Pew Research Center reports that “the wealth gap between America’s richest and poorer families more than doubled from 1989 to 2016.”
The U.S. still ranks well below many other developed countries in terms of social and economic mobility. On a list using data from the World Economic Forum, we come in at No. 27.
And the U.S. performed poorly on two recent indexes ranking countries by the quality of their democracies and their levels of corruption.
The Fulcrum reports that for the second year in a row, Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index found corruption in the United States on the rise. For 2019, the country received a score of 69, a two-point drop from the year before and its worst score in a decade. Because France got the same score, both were ranked No. 23 out of the 180 countries included in the index.
Meanwhile, the United States has only the 25th best democracy in the world, according to the 14th annual Democracy Index published by the Economist Intelligence Unit, a part of the British-based company that publishes the Economist magazine.
That ranking places the United States among the nations considered to be “flawed democracies” in 2019.
