It's fashionable to spout the belief that America's health care system is among the world's worst, but, as usual, the facts point in a direction opposite what the MSM would want you to believe. First, John Stossel deconstructs the highly-touted World Health Organization study:
The New York Times recently declared "the disturbing truth ... that ... the United States is a laggard not a leader in providing good medical care."And in case you were wondering, don't get cancer in Britain, home of the vaunted NHS.As usual, the Times editors get it wrong.
They find evidence in a 2000 World Health Organization (WHO) rating of 191 nations and a Commonwealth Fund study of wealthy nations published last May.
In the WHO rankings, the United States finished 37th, behind nations like Morocco, Cyprus and Costa Rica. Finishing first and second were France and Italy. Michael Moore makes much of this in his movie "Sicko."...
The WHO judged a country's quality of health on life expectancy. But that's a lousy measure of a health-care system. Many things that cause premature death have nothing do with medical care. We have far more fatal transportation accidents than other countries. That's not a health-care problem.
Similarly, our homicide rate is 10 times higher than in the U.K., eight times higher than in France, and five times greater than in Canada.
When you adjust for these "fatal injury" rates, U.S. life expectancy is actually higher than in nearly every other industrialized nation.
Cancer survival rates in Britain are among the lowest in Europe, according to the most comprehensive analysis of the issue yet produced.Look at the chart in the article; you'll see that the United States ranks Number One for cancer survival rates for both men and women.England is on a par with Poland despite the NHS spending three times more on health care.
Survival rates are based on the number of patients who are alive five years after diagnosis and researchers found that, for women, England was the fifth worst in a league of 22 countries. Scotland came bottom. Cancer experts blamed late diagnosis and long waiting lists.
