
Originally Posted by
All Good Things
Eric, you know in the aggregate, this is not an actual contest, right? I mean where a country falls in such a comparison is just an arbitrary ranking that depends on many factors and variables, including how the data are sliced.
And that nobody ranked one actually wins a trophy or gets to go to Disneyland.
The question to ask is not "Where does the U.S. really rank," it's "Where does the U.S. really rank at things that actually matter to people?"
If you spend a great deal of time traveling and living abroad, you'll soon enough appreciate that people around the world value different things. Their health care choices tend to reflect that value structure.
In the vast majority of the advanced industrialized nations, "health care" is treated as a minimally invasive, preventative care process with protection against extremes -- like being bankrupted by a terrible illness, which can and still does happen in the U.S.
If you are largely healthy, exercise and watch what you eat, you actually may find yourself better off with the health care cultures in countries like Canada, the U.K and Japan.
The reason you are so indignant -- or perhaps just insistently demanding -- about the U.S.'s ranking is that you've been exposed -- like everybody in the U.S. -- to the constant drumbeat of heroic life-saving, leading-edge-technology miracle hype blasting out over every media channel every day all over the U.S. How could the country that deploys all this magic, 23rd-century bioengineered genetically-mapped triply-tested, screened, examined, surgery-focused, God-damn-it-fix-it-right-now technology not have the "best" health care?
Because the U.S. has a heroic, hail-Mary pass, go for the miracle system. In terms of actual health, it's non-preventative, bordering on non-supportive.
But damn, if you are 450 lbs, with high blood pressure, diabetes, have lost a foot to gout, burst your gastric-bypass stitches because you couldn't stop eating 6,000 calories a day and can barely lift your head off the gurney -- no problem! Our expert physicians and hospital staff who have spent their entire lives in training will jump right on your (nightmarishly self-indulgent, selfish and self-destructive lunatic) case and fix you right up!
This also is why the whole system is just mind-blowingly expensive. There is nothing in the system to encourage personal responsibility at all, and everything in the system to encourage people to do anything they feel like doing and waiting for others to pay the bill.
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