Health care system efficiency and Life Expectancy: a 140-country study

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 effi...