The World of Chaos - Organized Medicine + Politics = Health Care Reform

 We used to say the two biggest lies are "The check is in the mail" and "It won't hurt a bit." Now, there is a third biggest lie, which is, "We have the best health care system in the world," as Bill Clinton and George Bush uttered repeatedly during their respective terms. On the other hand, all of the standard measures of health care quality points to ours as being "the best substandard price-gouging health care system in the world". One such measure is a comparison of cost and longevity. For example, Americans live an average of 77 years for $4,800 per person per year, while Spain, Canada, and Japan respectively have life span-to-cost ratios of 79 years at $1,100, 81.5 years at $2,100, and 81 years at $2,000.

Another measure is the infant death rate per one thousand live births and the U.S. has a rate comparable to third-world countries at 6.9 compared to 5.3 in Denmark, 4.6 in France, 3.4 in Sweden, and 3.2 in Japan. Additionally, the World Health Organization ranks the United States as 37th in the world, which puts us just behind Costa Rica.

Therefore, we can see that the people of other countries get better outcomes for much less cost, suggesting that we Americans are paying more for inferior quality products and services. Although President Obama and other politicians acknowledge that health care is too expensive, they seem to be downplaying the fact that organized medicine has been giving the public a royal hosing for decades.

Some of the problems with U.S. healthcare delivery as many other experts have also pointed out are as follows:

Hospitals, nursing homes, and clinics are unsafe with medical and nursing negligence being the fifth largest cause of death in the United States.

Lack of access with 76 million uninsureds (adding illegal aliens) and 106 million underinsureds;

Out of control cost with health care being 16% of gross domestic product (GDP) at $1 trillion which is a 250% increase over the last 25 years;