Saturday, December 12, 2009

Health Care :: How to Proceed in A Rational World

From www.wikipedia.en

From http://www.wikipedia.en.
Universal health care is implemented in all industrialized countries, with the exception of the United States.[1] It is also provided in many developing countries. So American exceptionalism means that most of the "civilized world" has health care and we went our Separate way. This could be for got reason: American health care statistics could be better than the entire world, (the same site documents this is not so). The natural way to proceed if the problem, poor American health care, would be a three pronged approach. First we would find out what the characteristics of the health care systems in the rest of the world, second we would study cost considerations, third we would provide a program for action based on what we learned in the first approach. Instead we encourage random and unadulterated expression of freedom with the viewpoint that any opinion is equally valid and in the cacophony choice gets made on the basis of political power and the clout and noise level of the participants, not on any inquiry. The truth is that humans have been evolved for difficult circumstances and the rati0nality of inquriy has a limited extent influenced the debate. International healthcare data is available at the world health organization and economic data elsewhere so its very surprising that international data has not been carefully studied. Here is the most complete table I could find this morning at Wikipedia. We spend twice as much money per-capita as our nearest industrialized competitor and get poorer results. Since the data is available but a careful discussion is really not, this will be provided from the Web data on this site. However, the US resembles an Elderly patient with total systems colapse se we need to briefly deal with the other major issues before we proceed to discuss health care in detail.
Country ↑ Life expectancy ↓ Infant mortality rate ↓ Physicians per 1000 people ↓ Nurses per 1000 people ↓ Per capita expenditure on health (USD) ↓ Healthcare costs as a percent of GDP ↓ % of government revenue spent on health ↓ % of health costs paid by government ↓
Australia 81.4 4.2 2.8 9.7 3,137 8.7 17.7 67.7
Canada 80.7 5.0 2.2 9.0 3,895 10.1 16.7 69.8
France 81.0 4.0 3.4 7.7 3,601 11.0 14.2 79.0
Germany 79.8 3.8 3.5 9.9 3,588 10.4 17.6 76.9
Japan 82.6 2.6 2.1 9.4 2,581 8.1 16.8 81.3
Norway 80.0 3.0 3.8 16.2 5,910 9.0 17.9 83.6
Sweden 81.0 2.5 3.6 10.8 3,323 9.1 13.6 81.7
UK 79.1 4.8 2.5 10.0 2,992 8.4 15.8 81.7
US 78.1 6.7 2.4 10.6 7,290 16.0 18.5 45.4

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