Medical

Years ago, the World Health Organization came out with a ranking of health systems that placed the US 37th. Over time, there's been a fair amount of controversy over the WHO's methodology, and so the Commonwealth Foundation began a new project to assemble a comparative international picture: They chose seven countries and conducted deep, ongoing polls of both patients and health-care providers. The surveys test experiences with the system, cost questions, efficiency, convenience, health outcomes and much more. The result is a comparison based not on an outsider’s methodology but on the experiences of patients and providers.

Here, too, the U.S. underperforms. Before looking at that data, it's always worth reminding people of how much more we pay than anybody else. The following chart measures per-person health-care spending. And remember, while reading it, that the U.S. is actually advantaged by this measure: Unlike other countries, we don't have universal health care, so about 50 million of us are spending less than we otherwise migh