Percutaneous coronary intervention — the procedure that opens a blocked coronary artery during a heart attack — is close to an ideal proxy for healthcare access broadly. It is definitionally time-sensitive: the ACC/AHA guidelines set a 90-minute door-to-balloon target for a reason, and delays beyond that threshold carry measurable mortality/morbidity consequences.
The United States is not perfect. Eleven point seven million Americans live beyond the 90-minute window for emergency cardiac care… [That] represents 3.5% of the population of a continent-spanning nation — and … no comparable country on earth comes close to matching it. Canada, the country most frequently held up as the model America should follow, leaves 28.7% of its population outside that same window, including over a million people in densely populated … areas. Rural healthcare access is a genuinely hard problem at continental scale and the headline should be that the United States has solved more of that problem than anyone else.
Source: Anish Koka, The Health Care Blog