To: Brumar89 who wrote (192298 ) 7/20/2006 2:35:12 PM From: geode00 Read Replies (2) | Respond to I do not want my tax money going to a private school that preaches rapture, for example, or druid-ism for that matter. In traditional Medicare, just 2 percent of the money goes to overhead. Private sector plans, by contrast, spend an average of 15 percent on overhead. That might seem counter-intuitive if you assume, as many Americans do, that government is inherently inefficient. But it makes sense when you consider that the government doesn't have to spend money on advertising, among other things...."cbsnews.com I think we have pretty decent healthcare already. Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and half times the industrialized world’s median of $2,193; the extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. What does that extra spending buy us? Americans have fewer doctors per capita than most Western countries. We go to the doctor less than people in other Western countries. We get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other Western countries. We are less satisfied with our health care than our counterparts in other countries. American life expectancy is lower than the Western average. Childhood-immunization rates in the United States are lower than average. Infant-mortality rates are in the nineteenth percentile of industrialized nations. Doctors here perform more high-end medical procedures, such as coronary angioplasties, than in other countries, but most of the wealthier Western countries have more CT scanners than the United States does, and Switzerland, Japan, Austria, and Finland all have more MRI machines per capita. Nor is our system more efficient. newyorker.com But what about when that ratio is 3:1? Or 2.5:1?
