International comparison of health care systems

The issue concerning efficiency evaluation of health care systems has become increasingly important in the context of ever growing health care expenditure in the U.S. vis-a-vis the other industrialized nations. International comparison of healthcare systems is commonly practiced using subjective methods available in the literature, which lead to non-standard rankings. Each individual investigator uses different subjective judgment and assigns varying weights to measurements in each class. Hence, a mathematical evaluation method, based on the concept of Pareto-optimal organization, is proposed in this paper. This method is easy to apply and uses a linear programming model. The weights for various measurements are determined by an objective method and are standardised. The United States is ranked lowest under most of the categories of health care system. Japan with highest life expectancy, lowest child mortality rate and health care expenditures is ranked number one under most of the categories.