U.S. number 1 in health care?

Now, class, move your desks forward and listen up while I offer a short lecture on what you get for your healthcare dollar in the United States of America.

First, you get “the finest healthcare system in the world.” For weeks, months, years and decades, you’ve heard our congressional ladies and gentlemen call it that - “the finest healthcare system in the world.”

you get a healthcare system that is, indeed, No.1 - numero uno, ichiban, no ka oi - in three important categories: total healthcare expenditures per capita, total health expenditures as a share of gross domestic product, and rate of growth in total healthcare expenditures as a share of GDP over the past quarter century.

But our healthcare system leads in other categories as well. For example, we lead in the number of people who do not have healthcare coverage: 46 million and growing. By the reckoning of the Commonwealth Fund, we should be using the number 75 million - which represents the uninsured and the underinsured. Either way, we lead.

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Q: Per polling data, what percentages of Americans and Canadians are satisfied with their current health care system?

A: A study found that 35 percent of Americans (2,500 were surveyed) are very confident they receive quality and safe care, 33 percent are very confident they receive the most effective drugs and 38 percent are very confident they receive the best medical technology, according to a report by The Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based private foundation that publishes research on health care issues. That’s compared to 26 percent of Canadians (3,000 were surveyed) very confident they will get quality and safe care, 32 percent very confident they receive the most effective drugs and 28 percent very confident they receive the best medical technology.

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After reading so much rubbish about national healthcare programs, it was refreshing to read Dan Boylan’s recent column.

As a former patient of the Australian, British, French and German national healthcare systems, as well as Kaiser Permanente, Queen’s and Straub, I have no qualms at all in saying that healthcare in the USA is one gigantic scam!

Socialized healthcare systems focus on the early identification of ailments and prompt cure to reduce costs.

The current USA system is for profit, i.e., there is little money to be made in curing patients; profit lies in extending an ailment to the maximum number of follow-up visits and prescriptions possible.

An ailment resulting in surgery is like winning the lottery for an American doctor, so why would one even attempt to prevent such an event?

American taxpayers will fork over an estimated $218 billion in 2009 just for diabetes, and billions more for dialysis treatments. Socialized healthcare systems don’t have those costs because doctors identify and treat the problem long before it becomes necessary to amputate limbs or perform other lifelong detrimental surgeries.

Rico Leffanta

Honolulu

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We are told that we have the best health care in the world. Is this true? Is there a worldwide organization that researches such information among countries?

Two groups, the World Health Organization and the Commonwealth Fund, issue reports that compare the U.S. health system with those in other countries.

A report by the WHO came out in 2000 as the first analysis of the world. The report, which some researchers said was flawed, found that France provides the best overall health care, followed by Italy, Spain, Oman, Austria and Japan. It determined that the U.S. health system spends a higher portion of its gross domestic product on health care than any other country; the United States ranked 37 out of 191 countries, according to its performance.

The Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation based in New York, also found that although the United States has the world's most costly health system, it "consistently underperforms on most dimensions of performance, relative to other countries," according to a 2007 report. It said that compared with Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the U.S. system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high-performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity and healthy lives.