The US. The best country in the world.

Left: Rising US Health Care Costs, Business Week. Click on image.

I used to see a guy now and then who was a car dealer. He was also a right wing US fanatic. "This is the best country in the world he would continually tell me." I asked him. If somebody was going to sell you a car and he or she said it was the best car in the world would you not respond by saying that you would like to test the others. Well you have never been in any other country in the world so how would you know if this is the best one or not? He would grumble in rage and walk away.

I continually hear a similar claim about US health care. We have the best health care system in the world is the claim. As with the car dealer most people have never been out of the US or experienced a different health care system. So how would they know? Well let us look at it. Let us look at what this US system delivers. After all the proof of the pudding is in the eating and the digestion.

When we do so the failure of the US health care system is staggering. This "the best health care system in the world" delivers the following:

The US is 31st in life expectancy worldwide. (It is even worse for African Americans. An African American in New Orleans has a shorter life expectancy than the average person in Vietnam or Honduras.)

The US is 37th in infant mortality.

The US is 34th in maternal mortality.

In the US a child is two and a half times as likely to die by five as in Singapore or Sweden.

An American woman is eleven times as likely to die in childbirth as a woman in Ireland.

The Robert Wood Foundation and Urban Institute did a study of how well nineteen countries did in avoiding "preventable deaths." The so-called best health care system in the world, that is here in the US, came in last.

Americans take ten per cent fewer drugs than citizens in other countries, but pay one hundred and eighteen per cent more per pill.

However there is one US health statistic that is above average. That is when Americans reach sixty five years of age. This is because medicare kicks in and they are covered. The private health care system and the profit motive in health care does not work. What is working is the lying propaganda machine of the health industrial profit addicted industry. It is especially successful given the pathetic cowardly failure of the labor leaders to put forward any alternative. They are bootlicking Obama and holding back the potential movement that could sweep out this profit mad system and establish a national health care system based on need and not profit and open to all and free at the point of use.

Sean.