U.S. healthcare: poor quality, high costs!

A new study reports that the U.S health system is the most expensive in the world, yet its quality among the industrialized world's worst.

The report, the second national scorecard from this influential health policy research group, shows that the United States spends more than twice as much on each person for health care as most other industrialized countries. But it has fallen to last place among those countries in preventing deaths through use of timely and effective medical care, according to the report by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit research group in New York.

The report highlights how inefficient the U.S. system of private medical insurance is documenting that administrative costs are much higher at about 7.5 percent, than in other countries.

Bringing those administrative costs down to the level of 5 percent or so as in Germany and Switzerland, where private insurers still play a significant role, would save an estimated $50 billion a year in the United States.

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