Many Americans are aware that the United States spends much more on health care than any other country in the world. But fewer people know that the health of Americans-by many different measures-is actually worse than the health of citizens in other wealthy countries.

Two major reports, both released last year, provide further elaboration of this apparent paradox. The first, ‘The State of US Health, 1990-2010,” documented trends in mortality and morbidity across the thirty-four member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.). The study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (to which I am a contributing writer), showed that both life expectancy and healthy-life expectancy improved in the United States over two decades. But the pace of those improvements was considerably slower in the United States: in 1990, the U.S. ranked twentieth among O.E.C.D. countries for life expectancy, and fourteenth for healthy-life expectancy; by 2010, it had fallen to twenty-seventh and twenty-sixth, respectively. The other charts and tables in the report-about heart, lung, and kidney disease; diabetes; injuries and homicides; depression; and drug abuse-all show Americans suffering poorer health.

The second report, commissioned by the National Institutes of Health, and conducted by the National Research […]