An excellent article on USA health care costs in today's Washington Post: Turns out the UK, Oz and Canada plus other systems all cost less and deliver more. the article concludes
[quote]As for the approach that�s helped every other industrialized country achieve universal coverage at about half our costs? Well, we�re still not ready to talk about that. [/quote] so this is not a republican or democrat post, just a frustrated one.
USA #1 Health costs
We've had discussions before on OCF about the amazingly high numbers some of us have seen on our insurance claims, not to mention our out of pocket costs not covered.
Here's an excerpt of that full article
[quote] I found it buried inside a Kaiser Family Foundation brief entitled �Health Care Spending in the United States and Selected OECD Countries.� Inauspicious, maybe. But it should change the way we think about health-care costs. Because what it shows is that we�ve failed. Failed to control costs. Failed to restrain the growth of government.

And it shows something else, too: Where we�ve failed, others have succeeded.

Everyone knows � or should know � that the United States spends much more than any other country on health care. But the Kaiser Family Foundation broke that spending down into two parts: the government�s share and the private sector�s share (both measured as a percentage of total gross domestic product), then compared the results to figures from 12 other countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. And here�s the shocker: Our government spends more on health care than the governments of Japan, Australia, Norway, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Canada or Switzerland.[/quote]
Charm