alt Hacker News15 out of the top 50 and 4/6 top hospitals in the world are in the US: https://rankings.newsweek.com/worlds-best-hospitals-2025
Again, I’m not saying the health care outcomes are better, or the value is better. I’m saying the hospitals are nicer, the doctors are the best, etc.
Perhaps this is the wrong thing to optimize for! But we are getting something.
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Quoting you:
> "The quality of health care in the US is significantly higher than anywhere else in the world."
Common Wealth Study of 10 Western Countries (U.S. lags far behind the other countries)
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...
Peterson-KFF Research
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...
Numbeo Health Care Inex
https://www.numbeo.com/health-care/rankings_by_country.jsp?t...
On an anecdotal basis, I relied on the Taiwanese National Health (NHI) for years and found it vastly superior in terms of quality and cost to the United States.
Perhaps a more accurate claim might be: The quality of the health care system in the U.S. is unparalleled provided that you are in the 1% that can afford it.
> 15 out of the top 50 and 4/6 top hospitals in the world are in the US
Outliers do not say much about the overall quality of healthcare in a country. Rather obvious lesson in statistics.
Reminds me of the Russian mathematician who moved to the US after the fall of the Soviet Union. Most of his essays were criticizing American students, but in one essay he was quite frank:
Russians who graduate with math degrees are better than Americans who do so, by a wide margin. However, the average American is better at math because they still get access to some math education in university and do not need to be a top student for admission. Whereas in Russia, if you didn't meet a rather high bar, you simply couldn't get admitted as an engineering/physics/math program, and thus couldn't further your math education (I believe he said the cutoff was even before university).
Country with the top mathematicians, but country with worse math outcomes.