How does Australia’s healthcare system stack up?

A comparative analysis of health system performance across ten countries, including Australia, reveals critical insights to shape future policy decisions. This evaluation underscores the profound influence of national policy choices on a country’s overall health and wellbeing.

The report focused on five key domains of health system performance: access to care, care processes, administrative efficiency, equity, and health outcomes.

The findings are compelling: Australia’s healthcare system emerged as the “overall” top performer, with the Netherlands and the United Kingdom following closely behind. Interestingly, the two highest-ranked countries, Australia and the Netherlands, also maintain the lowest healthcare spending as a share of GDP.

In stark contrast, the United States ranked last despite spending the highest percentage of GDP (16.5%) on healthcare.

Access to care examined the affordability and availability of services at the population level. The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Germany stood out, with both the Netherlands and Germany achieving top scores in affordability and availability.

However, Australia faired poorly when it came to access to care. Roughly half of Australian patients who do not choose to purchase voluntary health insurance have to wait longer to receive services. Affordability is also a noted challenge.

Equity, which measures disparities in healthcare access and experiences between individuals of varying income levels, also presented a mixed picture. Australia and Germany ranked highest, indicating minimal differences in healthcare access and care experiences among residents with below-average and above-average incomes. Conversely, New Zealand and the U.S. landed at the bottom, exhibiting the greatest income-related disparities in access issues and reports of discrimination based on race or ethnicity.

Yet, when the definition of equity expanded to include geographic and gender factors, Australia’s ranking fell dramatically from first to sixth place, reflecting poor performance in rural and remote areas compared to urban counterparts.

Health outcomes, the ultimate measure of a healthcare system’s effectiveness, were assessed through metrics such as life expectancy at birth, excess deaths related to the pandemic, and avoidable deaths. Among the ten countries analysed, Australia, Switzerland, and New Zealand performed the best, while the United States ranked last.

“Despite spending a lot on healthcare, the United States is not meeting one of the principal obligations of a nation: to protect the health and welfare of its residents. Most of the countries we compared are providing this protection, even though each can learn a good deal from its peers. The U.S., in failing this ultimate test of a successful nation, remains an outlier,” the report concluded.

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