International Health Care Systems Health, Medicine, Nursing Essay (Essay Sample)

International Health Care SystemsNameInstitution
Introduction
Every country would want to meet health and medical needs of its population without necessarily bankrupting or draining resources that are meant to cater for other human requirements. Faced with varied political, economic, environmental, cultural, demographic, and epidemiologic forces, each nation is in the “business” of tailoring its health care system to the particular needs and characteristics of the existing population (Morrissey et al., 2015). Also, ways of measuring effectiveness of health care provision are needed so as to regulate and improve care in meeting the population’s demand. All these factors determine the health care system profile of a country. Globally, health care policymakers are faced with the reality of lowering costs while improving safety and quality of care. More specifically, the US engaged in health care reform leading to formulation of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) by using or citing health policy approaches from other international health care systems (Morrissey et al., 2015). Despite this effort, US health care system is the most expensive yet underperforms on most performance dimensions relative to other countries. Therefore, this paper analyzes this low performance in comparison to other international health care systems using dimensions such as quality of care, access, efficiency, equity, healthy lives, and health expenditure.