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: Life Expectancy (longest), Infant Mortality (least), Health Care Expenditure per Capita (highest), and Prevalence of Physicians (greatest). My source for these stats was the invaluable Nationmaster.com . [ UPDATED 9/24: 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)."