The discussion got a little heated in another thread, with many participants claiming that the U.S. "has the best healthcare in the world", and that "government involvement in healthcare will both erode quality and increase costs".

In the interest of just putting the facts out there, consider these. There are are myriad of sources of facts regarding healthcare on the internet that anyone can check. I used studies done by Forbes magazine, the World Health Organization and The World Bank.

Maybe the best way to present my findings are in a series of brief statements. Any of these can be fact-checked and more extensive explanations provided.

-- In almost any of the studies done recently, the U.S. doesn't come close to being the healthiest country in the world. The Forbes article had us ranked 11th healthiest in the world. Their criteria included" life expectancy, infant motality, physician density, TB frequency, air and soil quality and access to healthy water and sanitation. The top countries in the Forbes study were Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Germany and Switzerland.

-- The U.S. is well down the list in life expectancy and we experience relatively high infant mortality. We ranked 50th in life expectancy and 26th in infant mortality among the industrialized countries.

-- Notwithstanding the results, the U.S. has by far the highest cost healthcare system in the world. Whether measured as per capita expenditures or as a percentage of GDP, the U.S. spends well more than twice the amount of the average of developed countries. On the WHO listing, our expenditures were 50% greater than the country with the second most expensive healthcare system (Switzerland). But in "bang for the buck" Switzerland won out, being ranked as being the 2nd healthiest country in the world by Forbes. The U.S. spends more than 2-1/2 times more on a per capita basis than the median average of the 14 most developed countries.

-- The U.S. was the only country included in any of the surveys that had a private healthcare system. All other countries had some form of government insurance or single-payer system. The analysis by the WHO indicated that the private system in the U.S. largely explained the high cost of healthcare in the U.S. The study by the WHO indicated that the high costs in the U.S. were mostly the result of the rising costs of medical technology, prescription drugs and particularly the high administrative costs resulting from the complex and multi-layered multiple payer system in the U.S. The WHO also noted that having almost 20% of it's population uninsured also contributes significantly to high costs. They note that "conditions among the uninsured that could have been prevented or treated inexpensively in the early stages often develop into health crises" and treatment at that stage becomes dramatically more expensive. WHO estimated that costs in the U.S. were in the range of 30-34% higher than necessary as the result of excessive administrative costs and profit for the providers.

-- The WHO noted that "the U.S. was the only country in the developed countries in the world except South Africa which does not provide health care for all of it's citizens." Their study noted that "the hodge-podge of multi-layered private companies that pay for healthcare insurance in the U.S. add dramatically to costs". They note in their study that the profit-driven "non-system" in the U.S. results in significant gaps in coverage, further adding to costs as the uninsured seek emergency room treatment.

-- The U.S. ranked next to last among the industrialized countries in the number of it's citizens who die while experiencing some form of disability. Only Denmark ranked lower.

-- The WHO study measured "fairness in financing", where the U.S. was ranked as the lowest (least fair) in distributing the contributions which fund healthcare across the population. The existence of healthcare "haves" and "have nots" was attributed to the absence of any central control of a system with a huge number of profit-driven providers.

-- One final study done by the WHO was a survey of citizens in the most industrialized countries, seeking to determine how satisfied the residents of the countries were with the healthcare provided to them. Most of the countries ranking high on the scale of having the best healthcare systems also had the most satisfied citizens. The satisfaction of the higher-rated countries was often in the 70-80% range among the healthiest countries. Notwithstanding the amount spent on healthcare in the U.S., our residents registered among the least satisfied with their healthcare, with only 41% of the U.S. survey participants registering satisfaction..
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As I said, there is a wealth of analytical information available on the internet. Everyone should take the time to do their own research on how our system of healthcare stacks up. Knowing that the expense of our system of healthcare is growing at a rate that is a multiple of inflation, and that the number of U.S. citizens that are uninsured is growing (a recent study says that 14,000 people per day are losing their health insurance, either because their employers stops offering it or because they can no longer afford it), makes our understanding of the situation important as we follow the reform legislation that is making it's way thru Congress.