More garbage!

A couple of facts to note relative to metrics:

Stats clearly show mortality rates from cancer and heart disease higher in Canada and the UK than in the U.S. The reasons are because those systems limit care and do not try extraordinary measures that are routinely used in the U.S.

The same for infant mortality stats. They are weighted against the U.S. system because if a child draws one breath in the U.S., it is considered a live birth (and thus an infant mortality) where most countries have weight/length requirements to consider it a live birth. If the child is under-developed, it's considered a fetal death, not an infant death. Huge difference.

The U.S. will use extraordinary measures and expensive technology to try and save premature infants that simply don't get that care in Canada or the UK. That accounts for higher costs.

The U.S. spends far more to try and extend life than Canada or the UK, where end of life procedures that are routine in the U.S. are simply not used in those systems. So are costs cheaper in, say Canada, by some metrics – yes, because they limit care in areas where the U.S. does not.

And the U.S. is about the only country putting billions of dollars into developing new medical technologies and drugs. If the U.S. goes to a (mostly) government run system, those advances will dry up and go away. Those systems depend on the U.S. to develop what is needed and thus save on research & development. Either those countries will have to step up and spend more money, which is doubtful, or medical advances are going to slow way down.

Liberals have a great distaste for profit being a part of a health care system, but it's that incentive for profit that pushes forward wonderful advances in technology and drug therapies that are saving millions of lives annually.

You can keep disparaging our system, but the facts are it delivers the greatest health care in the world to its citizens, and others.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/115086.php

http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/06/health-care-reform-congress-politics-opinions-contributors-whitman-raad.html