I See What You Mean

Here's another look at public health stats from various countries around the world. As with the first installment of this series , the countries included here rank in the Top 5 in at least one of four categories: Life Expectancy (longest), Under-5 Mortality (least), Health Care Expenditure per Capita (highest), and Prevalence of Physicians (greatest). (Source: Nationmaster.com .) NOTE: Unlike the previous chart, this one omits Macau and Hong Kong, which had made the cut because of their populations' longevity. I omitted these two Chinese territories because the only available figures on the geographical distribution of physicians reflect China as a whole. Result: not only does this camouflage the serious disparity between urban centers and rural districts, it obscures any geographical specifics. Comments and questions are invited.

In selecting my international sample, I decided to examine the top 5 countries in each of four categories:  Longest life expectancy (longest) Lowest infant mortality (least) Highest health care expenditure per capita Greatest prevalence of physicians My source for these stats was the invaluable Nationmaster.com . (Note:  As a proxy for Hong Kong and Macau, I've used China's expenditure figure, since they've both been under Chinese rule for the last decade.) Given where the two dimensions of this graph ultimately lead, I've nicknamed it "Death and Taxes (Sorta)."