Adding it up

I recently heard a U.S. Senator make a statement that we have “the best health care in the world,” so I decided it was time for me to prove him correct. You can easily research topics today using the Internet, so I went to the World Health Organization Web site. I consider average lifespan to be a good indicator of health and found us ranked 42nd in the world, proving I was wrong about lifespan being a good indicator.

I then looked at “Performance” of health care (how well services get to the citizenry) and saw that also was not a good indicator, since we were ranked 72nd. Certainly a country so concerned with babies being born (the abortion debate) would rank at the top in infant mortality, but this showed us at five infant deaths per 1,000 live births and in 34th place. Prevention of health care related deaths showed us gaining, up to 14th (Canada was ranked fourth best). Our overall rank compared to the rest of the world was 37th best.

Surely I could find something to show that senator right. At last I found a category where the good old USA was first; we spend far more money per person and as a percent of our GDP than any other country in the world. I also found it interesting that, with all the negative Canadian ads, our neighbor to the north was ahead of us in every category except costs. That senator could not really “lie” to me, could he?

Ron Wood

Malden