How does one measure the effectiveness of a healthcare system? (I have stated objections to the term healthcare system in a previous post; but we are stuck with it as the accepted label in policy circles.) Some measures seem fairly obvious, life expectancy, infant mortality, timely access to care, number of healthcare workers per thousand of the national population, etc. The number of metrics appears to be limited only by the ingenuity of statisticians. Harder to measure is the opportunity cost of doing option A rather than option B within the system because if B is never [...]