[vidarh]

The WHO tends to rank US healthcare quite poorly compared to most other developed countries. Last report I saw, it placed around 37th place worldwide, and pretty much all of the countries above the US have universal, government funded healthcare systems.

It's worth pointing out too, that the US government actually pays more per capita for healthcare than most governments that provide universal healthcare, so US taxpayers pay more and need private insurance..

[crusso]

WHO healthcare ratings were torn apart to no end because of poor methodology. Jeez, they used literacy rates and "income inequality" for some of their metrics on judging healthcare.

The WHO ratings were more about politics than healthcare.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB125608054324397621?mg=...

When you drill down into specifics, like survival rates for cancer, the US healthcare system is the best in the world, BAR NONE:

http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@epidemiologysurvei...

[nolok]

To quote myself from one of my comment on an older thread about cancer treatement difference between France and the USA for a rich family [1]

This quote and the study it talks about is relevant, because it directly aims at the access and quality of treatment for the poor and middle class.

>In 2000, the World Health Organization ranked the French health system as the best over all in the world. Do you agree?

>I question the W.H.O. methodology, which has serious problems with data reliability and the standards of comparison. A study I would take more seriously is one published last year by Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee in the journal Health Affairs. They examined avoidable mortality — that is, deaths whose risk of occurrence would be far lower if the population had access to appropriate health care interventions. In that study, based on data for the year 2000, France was also ranked No. 1, with the lowest rate of avoidable deaths. The United States was last, in 19th place, with the highest rate of avoidable deaths. That’s a severe indictment of our health care system in my judgment and calls attention, quite justifiably, to the high performance of the French health care system. http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/health-car....

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7242788

[stdgy]

You should temper that 'best in the world' rhetoric.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/cancer-care-in-the-u-s-v...

[crusso]

Just in that first paragraph, the author goes way off course creating a straw man about what his opponents find objectionable about the ACA.

I'll bookmark it and read through it later, but from what I glanced at in the first half, it didn't get much better after that straw man. I especially like where it tried to say that government decisions are better because they're made on "evidence". Okay.