When it comes to dealing with preventable deaths researchers have found that the French, Japanese and Australians are at the top of the league and the Americans at the bottom.
A team of researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine say if the health system in the United States was as good as those of the top three countries 101,000 lives would be saved each year.
The researchers Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee carried out a study which focused on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations.
They tracked deaths that they deemed could have been prevented by access to timely and effective health care, and ranked nations on how they performed; they say such deaths provide an important way of gauging the performance of a country's health care system because the figures are sensitive to improved care, including public health initiatives.
Their rankings were established by taking into account death before age 75 from numerous causes, including heart disease, stroke, certain cancers, diabetes, certain bacterial infections and complications of common surgical procedures.
The researchers say such deaths accounted for 23 percent of overall deaths in men and 32 percent of deaths in women.
France came top with 64.8 deaths deemed preventable by timely and effective health care per 100,000 people, in the study period of 2002 and 2003.
Japan had 71.2 and Australia had 71.3 such deaths per 100,000 people, while the United States had 109.7 such deaths per 100,000 people.
Spain was fourth, followed in order by Italy, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, Greece, Austria, Germany, Finland, New Zealand, Denmark, Britain, Ireland and Portugal, with the United States last.