Health Care Systems around the world

If you missed last Tuesday's episode of Frontline entitled Sick Around the World you missed one of the most informative documentaries on the cost and value of health care that has ever been made. I'll just summarize for you some of the more important points it made. But I encourage you to go to the website link above and scroll to the bottom of the page where you can view the whole thing online.
In our country we spend 15.3% of our GNP on health care. But our outcomes and quality of life and death are much lower than in other countries. We have a higher infant mortality rate and a lower life expectancy than the the five other countries examined. The other countries included Great Britain, Taiwan, Japan, Switzerland and Germany. Some of them charge premiums, some don't. What they do in common is lower percentages of GNP spent than us and arguably, better care. I always thought that the over use of MRI's and CT scanners was the driving factor for our expensive system but Japan has many times over the number of scanners we have. They are all also SINGLE PAYER systems, the dreaded "government run" health care. The republicans harping about how terrible the Medicare bureaucracy is simply meant to distract us while their cronies rob us blind. Medicare is a very efficient system. Medicare "reform" has been an expensive boondoggle of the American people. Bush and his wealthy friends in the hospital, drug company and insurance industry sat down and divided Medicare into fat slices of cash pie split three ways. Medicare was supposed to be reformed by forming Medicare HMOs. What they didn't tell us was their real plan.
Start off by supplementing the health insurance companies, drug companies and hospitals to fool people with relatively low rates for their policies. They could do this because Bush pays these companies 12% MORE than he pays Medicare. So they rope all the elderly and disabled into the Medicare HMOs and get them used to their policies because they have perks like crappy dental and vision coverage. It seems like a no brainer for the users now but there is more to their plan. They will continue to raise their rates every year. They will continue to cut coverage and raise co-pays. But by the time the average person understands what they are doing it will be too late to go back to plain old Medicare coverage because it will be gone. That is where our system is headed now, a profit-making system where giant corporations grow cash by providing us with expensive and ever shrinking coverage. When money is the measure, the unnecessary elements, like listening to the patient or examining them are bypassed in order to shovel them through the meat grinder of modern practice. It is not really that different from the way we treat cattle, except we don't get slaughtered, usually. Did I say how important it is that we get a Democrat elected?