Ranking of World Healthcare Systems

[windsurf]

The World Health Organization's ranking of the world's health systems

Has anyone seen a more recent ranking than this one? The WHO says it didn't do a followup because of the "complexity of the task." At number 37, at least the U.S. beat Cuba.

[NW-Bound]

Here's a side note that I found interesting. The WHO says that the Full Health Life Expectancy in the US is 67.5 for men, and 72.6 for women.

Now, that seems low. So, I double checked with data from CDC for 2006, the latest year that I could find. CDC said that "In 2006, life expectancy for females was 80.2 years, ... and life expectancy for males was 75.1 years ...".

So why the differences? Ah hah, it is in the definition of "Full Health Life Expectancy".

Full Health Life Expectancy: Average number of years that a person can expect to live in "full health" by taking into account years lived in less than full health due to disease and/or injury.

So, for men, we can expect to live 75.1 years, but only 67.5 years of that will be "quality life". I don't have as much left as I thought!



PS. Oops. Forgot that those numbers are "expectancy at birth". For a 52-year old, the numbers should be higher.