If America's So Great, Where's Our Health Care?

The rest of the industrialized world gets universal health care. The U.S. gets limited access at a far higher cost. It's time for Americans to get the health care system they want, and the savings that go with it.

Great article; the entire thing can be found here.

It's interesting that

Among politicians and pundits, a universal, publicly funded system is off the table.

yet...

The public debate around universal health care proceeds as if it were a wild, untested experiment -- as if the United States would be doing something never done before.

A couple of other things from the article really stand out:

The United States spends by far the most on health care per person -- more than twice as much as Europe, Canada, and Japan which all have some version of national health insurance. Yet we are near the bottom in nearly every measure of our health.

The World Health Organization (WHO) ranks the U.S. health care system 37th of 190 countries, well below most of Europe, and trailing Chile and Costa Rica. The United States does even worse in the WHO rankings of performance on level of health -- a stunning 72nd. Life expectancy in the U.S. is shorter than in 27 other countries; the U.S. ties with Hungary, Malta, Poland, and Slovakia for infant mortality -- ahead of only Latvia among industrialized nations.

Although you'd never know it from the American media, the number of Canadians who would trade their system for a U.S.-style health care system is just eight percent.