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Health care system efficiency and life expectancy: A 140-country study
Author(s) -
Virginia Zarulli,
Elizaveta Sopina,
Veronica Toffolutti,
Ádám Lénárt
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0253450
Subject(s) - life expectancy , health care , data envelopment analysis , percentile , developing country , demographic economics , medicine , economics , demography , environmental health , economic growth , statistics , mathematics , population , sociology
Despite the evidence of links between health expenditure and health care efficiency, it is still unclear why countries with similar levels of health expenditures experience different outputs in terms of life expectancy at birth. Health care system efficiency might shed some light on the question. Using output-oriented data envelopment analysis, we compared the health systems of 140 countries in terms of attained life expectancy. Efficiency is determined by the distance from the closest country on the best practice frontier, which identifies the highest attainable life expectancy observed for any given level of health care spending. By using national data form the Human Development Data, we built the efficiency frontier and computed the potential life expectancy increase for each country. The potential improvement was, on average, 5.47 years [95%CI: 4.71–6.27 years]. The least efficient countries (10th percentile of the efficiency score) could improve by 11.78 years, while the most efficient countries (90th percentile of the efficiency score) could only improve by 0.83 years. We then analyzed, with regression analysis stratified by average education level, and by the role of health-related variables in differentiating efficient and inefficient countries from each other. The results suggest that, among countries with lower levels of education, decreasing unemployment and income inequality increases average life expectancy, without increasing health expenditure levels.

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