Health Care Delivery Systems: A Comparison of Today’s Health Care Delivery Systems Between the U.S.A and Austria

Health Care Delivery Systems: A Comparison of Today’s Health Care Delivery Systems Between the U.S.A and Austria

According to the 2000 World Health Organization report on comparing the health care systems, Austria with a population of 8,316,487, is ranked 9th in overall health system performance [4] [6]. The United States of America, on the other hand, with a population of 305,012,000 is ranked 37th in overall health system performance [4] [5]. The main criteria upon which the member countries were ranked upon were good health, responsiveness and fairness in financing [2]. A country is first considered to have a good health care system, when its health care status is as positive as it can possible be for all ages, gender and ethnicity groups [2]. Responsiveness measures the population‘s satisfaction of one‘sown country pertaining to treatment and client orientation of its health care providers [2]. Another aspect is fairness in financing, which focuses upon insurance protectionregardless of one‘s income [2].

Austria delivers, by law a universal social health care system, in which 98% of its entire population is insured [1]. One even has the choice to apply for additional private insurance coverage as well. The benefits include slightly better treatment and receiving a private patient room. The United States, on the other hand, provides a mixture of privatized and public health care systems in which an estimated 84.7% of its populationreceives some sort of insurance, whether it is private, governmental, out of one‘s pocket,or employer insurance. When comparing Austria to the United States health care delivery system, one identifies two completely distinct health care systems. The most important are quality of insurance, overall cost of insurance, and who receives access to insurance.