Measuring the Health of Nations: Updating an Earlier Analysis

Rankings: 1) France 2) Japan 3) Australia 4) Spain 5) Italy 6) Canada… 18) Portugal 19) USA. Maybe the United States is last but still not significantly behind?

It might seem like a stretch to compare the lowest ranked country to the average of the top 3, but, for all those that feel the USA is the best health care system it raises the questions of why they don’t think 100,000 annual deaths is a significant enough problem to lower their opinion of the current system. And remember the USA system costs something like twice as much as the average system: up to 16% of GNP in 2006.

I must say I would rather have the Toyota mindset shown by those talking about the USA health system instead of the claims of how the current USA health system is number 1. In Toyota’s horrible last year they still had a profit of about $14 billion (I believe something like 20 companies have every made that much). The United States health system sure has some things to point to positively but the system seems to be losing ground to the rest of the world more and more quickly while many cling to a belief it is the best system around.

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