The diagnosis is simple: “Our health-care system broke in 2020,” says Dr Tom Dolphin, an anaesthetist in London and boss of the British Medical Association. “We like to pretend it didn’t, but it really did. ” In the early months of 2020, hospitals paused normal activity to free up beds as they braced for a wave of covid-19 patients. The strategy helped in a moment of crisis. But, several years on, it is becoming clear that those measures did lasting damage to health-care systems. Understanding why is less straightforward. From admission to discharge, hospital care is now harder to access, takes longer and is of worse quality. The resulting toll includes avoidable deaths. Almost everyone is affected: across 18 rich democracies, satisfaction with health-care quality fell sharply after the pandemic and remains well below the pre-pandemic norm (see chart). Few data sets track hospital performance across countries, so The Economist collected data on health-care systems from all over the world to identify where things are going awry

Source