The Commonwealth Fund – U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective, 2026: “Countries around the world are grappling with the shared challenges of rising health care costs, physician burnout, and aging populations. Yet the United States has long been an outlier in several respects. The U.S., on average, has the poorest health outcomes of any high-income country, and among the poorest of the high- and middle-income nations belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Lack of universal coverage, weak primary care infrastructure, high out-of-pocket costs, and a complex insurance system contribute to and exacerbate the nation’s uniquely poor performance relative to its peers. The previous edition of U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective evaluated health spending, outcomes, status, and service use in the U.S. relative to 12 other OECD countries. The 2026 edition evaluates the U.S. health system relative to 19 other OECD countries across four key areas: insurance coverage and access to care, affordability of care, delivery of care, and equity of health outcomes. These nations, which are featured in the 2026 edition of the Commonwealth Fund’s International Health Care System Profiles, were selected to provide a more comprehensive view of how U.S. health care compares globally. They include:

We also compare U.S. performance to the OECD average, for the 38 countries for which data are available. For every metric we examine, we used the latest data available (from 2020 onward). See “How We Conducted This Study” for complete methods…”