Why America is failing its health report card | Robert B Shpiner

Americans spend 18% of our economy on healthcare, nearly twice the average of comparable nations, for worse results

The Commonwealth Fund published its 2026 report card on US healthcare this week, measuring the United States against 19 other wealthy countries. It runs the most expensive system on earth, and it buys some of the worst results in the developed world. I have spent more than four decades in the medical intensive care unit at UCLA, and I do not read those numbers as statistics. I read them as the people I admit.

We spend 18% of our economy on healthcare, nearly twice the average of comparable nations, and $12,649 a person, roughly 10 times what Mexico spends. For that fortune, American life expectancy peaked at 79 years, more than two years below our peers and third from the bottom of the group, above only Mexico and Turkey. Our rate of deaths that good care should have prevented is the second worst in the developed world. Only Mexico does worse.