Health care: coverage against rating
The WHO scores how widely essential health care reaches a country's people, from 0 to 100: care for mothers and children, infectious disease, chronic illness, and access to clinics and staff. Numbeo asks the people who use the care how good they find it. Each dot is a country. The dashed line is the rating you'd expect for its coverage, so dots well above or below it are where the two disagree. If you're weighing a move, look at both: one says whether the system reaches people, the other how its users find it.
Guatemala: rated 16.3 points higher than its coverage would suggest, the furthest above the line.
Tap a dot for its numbers. Tap it again, or the link below, to open the country.Hover over a dot for details. Click it to open the country profile.
Source: Numbeo Health Care Index, 2026; WHO UHC Service Coverage Index, 2023. geo-reality.com
Above the line
12 countries are rated at least 10 points higher than coverage alone would suggest: Guatemala, Ecuador, the Netherlands, South Korea, Kenya, Lithuania, Austria, Japan, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Estonia and France.
Below the line
10 countries are rated at least 10 points lower than coverage alone would suggest: Syria, Venezuela, Belarus, Ireland, Malta, Iran, Egypt, Montenegro, Albania and Hungary.
How close the match is
Wider coverage does go with better ratings: about 6 rating points for every 10 points of coverage. But coverage explains only 35% of the differences in ratings between countries. The rest comes from something else.
What explains the gap
We checked whether the gap goes with how well the government is run, cost of living, the share of health spending paid out of pocket, health spending per person, doctors per 1,000 people and income per person. None of them explains it. The closest, how well the government is run, has only a weak link. So the chart shows where coverage and ratings disagree, but our data can't say why.
The chart plots only countries with both figures from the sources below. A missing figure stays missing; we don't fill gaps. Countries without a complete pair:
Sources. Rating: Numbeo Health Care Index, 2026. It comes from surveys answered by Numbeo's own website visitors, not a random sample of each country, so treat small gaps as noise. Coverage: WHO UHC Service Coverage Index (SDG 3.8.1), 2023, the geometric mean of 14 tracer indicators of essential services on a scale of 0 to 100; the WHO notes that, because of data limitations, not all of them directly measure coverage. The expected rating is a least-squares line, recomputed from these 97 countries every time the data updates. The gap was checked against World Bank figures (government effectiveness, out-of-pocket share, health spending per person, doctors per 1,000, income per person at PPP) and Numbeo's cost of living index; correlation of the gap with each: how well the government is run 0.33, cost of living 0.20, the share of health spending paid out of pocket -0.20, health spending per person 0.15, doctors per 1,000 people -0.08, income per person 0.07. 104 countries omitted for missing data. Full methodology →