Just for being alive? for breathing? None. You are entitled to get what you pay for, and nothing more, whether food, shelter, healthcare, or tickets to the Rose Bowl. Any additional goods and services you receive are either freely given gifts are stolen goods.

No, you really don’t. Because it doesn’t matter what overall healthcare costs are – it matters what they cost ME, or the next guy. What does MY medical care cost.

The way it has been set up, thanks in no small part to physicians themselves as well as the tax code, I never think about what it costs ME, I think about my deductible and that’s it.

As long as you continue to talk about healthcare as a behemoth which must be dealt with from a societal standpoint, and by societal I mean government, you’re going to get government solutions. And that isn’t going to mean MORE free market.

That is just silly. That’s like saying we shouldn’t talk about GDP to evaluate the economy. Of course you have to talk about overall heathcare costs.

Don’t talk about the overall cost of healthcare. It’s irrelevant, unless you want all of society to fix it. And you don’t. You really want to deal with people as individuals.

The issue comes down to what is the minimum level of healthcare a person should be entitled to. Beyond that, it ought to be out of pocket. But when you have broad discussions about the overall “cost”, you move away from that.

1: What is considered a viable birth in the US is NOT considered a viable birth in Europe and much the rest of the world skewing results.

2: The level of morbid obesity in the US is much higher in the US than in Europe. This brings associated comorbidities such as CAD, DM, HTH, and others.

That is off the top of my head. Yes we can do better, using WHO numbers as gospel shows you don’t know the limitations of the study.

Trying to figure out how to improve healthcare without comparing yourself to countries that do a better job overall is foolish and willful ignorance. It is somewhat like saying that we shouldn’t learn from history.

Many advances in medical research depend on international cooperation. Why? Because we don’t have all the answers. Would you really suggest that the best way to improve US medical research would be to cut off communication with the rest of the world? That is what you are suggesting the US do in terms of researching how to improve the US healthcare industry. Such an idea is completely insular and unreasonable. Why you would advocate willful ignorance is rather beyond me.

“If international rankings were really that valuable, where is the mass exodus to France?”

It is hard to give you a reasonable response when you post such specious arguments. Where is the mass exodus to **anywhere** from one industrialized country to another based on healthcare? Oh, sure 3d worlders flock the US. That is primarily for jobs, though, and Mexico does rank 61st to the US’s 37 so that is quite a step up. However, it is a shame that the US is only better than **the 3d world** in overall health care.

“Instead, any “reform” (we can argue separately whether or not we really need reform) in the US will be uniquely American.”
Pardon my French, but F’ that. We wouldn’t even measure the quality cars with that kind of insular ignorance. Instead, we compare our domestic cars to the best the rest of the world has to offer and make our cars based on international standards of quality.

The kind of isolated quality standard you are proposing is, ironically, the kind perpetrated by totalitarian states with sub-par products, like a Volga or Soviet health-care, where they deliberately protect the populace from any facts about the outside world which would make the domestic situation seem less than ideal.

(I know you’ll be tempted to try to bring up Cuba some how, I don’t think bringing up a country that is ranked worse than the US is going to help your argument, especially since all other industrialized nations have government sponsored healthcare.)

Anyways, you are just trying to change the subject by saying it doesn’t matter how badly the US performs relative to other countries. I call bunk on such low standards. If 36 other countries can do better than the US then the US should try and take some “best practices” from those examples.

To review, I asked for a reliable measure of “healthcare” in comparison to other nations, because it was brought into this discussion. The point of my asking was to illustrate that no such measure exists.

Even if I provide examples where the US fairs better than the WHO reports, I still believe it is largely irrelevant to a discussion of the US healthcare system because the measures still do not meet the criteria they should for their inclusion in such a discussion.

The goal should be to improve healthcare (access and quality), not beat France. Your statement is one of national pride rather than concern for access to quality healthcare (“…explain how the US can move from its pathetically low ranking vs. other industrialized nations.”)

Some argue that we should look at systems in other nations that “beat” the US in these rankings to find ways to improve. To this I say a) The rankings are not reliable, even those that favor the US, and b) emulating systems employed elsewhere is a non-starter unless we also embrace their system of laws, tax system, and culture. Which isn’t going to happen.

Instead, any “reform” (we can argue separately whether or not we really need reform) in the US will be uniquely American. The metric that should be applied should be one which compares American systems to American systems. Comparisons among systems that work in the same culture, with the same cultural expectations and obligations, and against the same set of rules we must live with.

For example, do large, consolidated multi-specialty health systems (i.e. Mayo Clinic or Kaiser Permanente) provide better long term outcomes than traditional small practices and community hospitals? Do “all-inclusive” programs (VA, Kaiser) provide better outcomes than employer based or government based programs?

If international rankings were really that valuable, where is the mass exodus to France?