Healthcare: Ultimate outcomes

Today President Barack Obama addressed the AMA (American Medical Association) to talk about our broken healthcare system in the belly of the beast. Whay do I say the belly of the beast? Because the members of the AMA have opposed President Obama's call for the types of reforms the country need. He did a great job today with his speech. I listened to the whole thing live and recommend others listen to it as well.

I was thinking about medical outcomes as a result of his speech. He talked about unnecessary tests being done which drive costs up and don't really improve the outcome for the patient. Many have criticized the idea of a public option for Americans. They say this is nothing more than an attempt to have a Single Payer system. The critics talk about long waits for medical care and cite Canada as an example, as well as other countries which have national healthcare. Michael Moore addressed some of the critics in his last movie, Sicko". This is another movie worth seeing. So I gave more thought about what outcome is the most important outcomes to evaluate these different systems. I came up with Life Expectancy data. After all isn't that what we are all trying to do, live as long as we can and as healthy as we can? So here is some interesting data you might not be aware of.

Where do you think the US ranks in Life expectancy compared to other countries and where does counties like Canada rank? Here's the data based upon UN member Countries:

1. Japan (82.6 years)
2. Hong Kong
3. Iceland
4. Switzerland
5. Australia
6. Spain
7. Sweden
8. Israel
9. Macau
10. France
11. Canada * (80.7 years)
12. Italy
13 New Zealand * (80.2 years)
14. Norway
15. Singapore
16. Austria
17. Netherlands
18. Martinique
19. Greece
20. Belgium
21. Malta
22. United Kingdom* (79.4 years)
23. Germany
24. U.S. Virgin Islands
25. Finland
26. Guadeloupe
27. Channel Islands
28. Cyprus
29. Ireland
30. Costa Rica * (78.8 years)
31. Puerto Rico
32. Luxembourg
33. United Arab Emirates
34. South Korea
35. Chile * (78.6 years)
36. Denmark
37. Cuba * (78.3 years)
38. United States (78.2 years)

* Countries with National Healthcare or Single Payer systems

If you want the rest, click on this link.

So the question seems to be this, Is our medical system really as good as it should be? Looking at the data, countries which have Single payer systems, seem to outlive us.