Sunday, August 23rd 2009, 4:35 AM
What nation offers the best health care on the globe? Answer: Not the United States.
The U.S. health care delivery system is by far the costliest on the planet, but comparison studies consistently show Americans get second-rate results by nearly every benchmark.
"We're twice as expensive as most other industrialized countries," said Gerard Anderson, professor of health policy and management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.
"But we have outcomes that are typically about average, and we're not improving as quickly as other countries are improving," he said.
Last year, a study comparing preventable deaths in 19 industrialized countries placed the U.S. dead last. France was first, followed by Japan and Australia.
In the U.S., one in three chronically ill patients says the health care system needs to be rebuilt completely. Only one in 10 feels the same way in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
Foes of President Obama's push for universal coverage are quick to find fault with foreign systems, and some complaints are legitimate. In Canada, for example, a typical patient seeking surgical or other therapeutic treatment had to wait 18.3 weeks in 2007, an all-time high, one study showed.
But nonpartisan, scholarly studies show that for the most part, universal systems work well. And the key numbers, from infant mortality to life expectancy, show those countries are doing something right.
...Of the 30 industrialized countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, only Mexico, Turkey and the United States fail to achieve universal coverage
"There's a solidarity that operates in these other countries in terms of social values, a sense that people are entitled to health care," Osborn said. "In these countries, the idea of someone going bankrupt because of medical bills, it just does not exist." ...
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