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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (11358)	11/16/2009 4:52:17 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

Still if the case could be made, then you would think someone would have made it. There are not to many people who really care to spend time and money to show the US health care is number one. There are a large group of people who oppose "reform" efforts, but that's a different point. Also a significant subgroup of the people who have problems with the WHO data and other rankings are skeptical about the whole idea of such rankings, and so would be even less likely to produce their own, at least if it wasn't a trivial exercise (and rankings like the WHO rankings do take some serious effort). I number myself among the skeptics. The rankings have more to do with what you choose to measure than the exact measurement. Different criteria would give you very different rankings, even if you exclude things like measurements of equality or how well the system lives up to its imagined potential. The rankings take subjective opinions and put them in objective wrappers, but at its heart its still mostly subjective. The funding would certainly be available from the "powers that be" in this country. Who are these "powers that be"? I don't see to many sources of funding for something like this. Different parts of the health care and health insurance industries would pay money to research and lobby for or against "reform", but not so much to chant "we are number 1", or in particular something like "we are number 4", if the US would turn out to be near but not at the top in their rankings. Groups like CATO would be more interested in presenting arguments against heavy government control, than in presenting arguments like "the heavy government control in the US, works better than the heavy government control in France", to a lesser extent that would also apply to conservative rather than libertarian political groups.