Measuring The Health Of Nations: Updating An Earlier Analysis

TLDR

Amenable deaths comprise about 23 % of male and 32 % of female mortality under 75. We compared amenable mortality trends from 1997–98 to 2002–03 across the U.S. and 18 other industrialized nations.

Abstract

We compared trends in deaths considered amenable to health care before age seventy-five between 1997–98 and 2002–03 in the United States and in eighteen other industrialized countries. Such deaths account, on average, for 23 percent of total mortality under age seventy-five among males and 32 percent among females. The decline in amenable mortality in all countries averaged 16 percent over this period. The United States was an outlier, with a decline of only 4 percent. If the United States could reduce amenable mortality to the average rate achieved in the three top-performing countries, there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths per year by the end of the study period.