Rpruett said:
Apparently the WHO admits that they can't verify these rankings accurately due to the complexity of this issue. "The World Health Organization's ranking of the world's health systems was last produced in 2000, and the WHO no longer produces such a ranking table, because of the complexity of the task."
Way to link almost a nine year old list and pass it off as the current conditions and then on top of that, the people who did produce list essentially admit that they cannot make another list due to how complicated it is to create.
Several other glorious factors to include in this list? What are the criteria used to measure various health care systems?
- Overall Level of Health: (Think this is a tad subjective? Especially in America where many of the 'Health issues' are not Healthcare related at all but lifestyle/choice related). Distribution of Financing: Fairness of financial contribution: Distribution of Health in the Populations: - Responsiveness: (Not surprisingly America comes in at the top of this list. When it comes to medical emergencies? There is only one country I want to be taken care of ).
After looking over some of them, several which are premised with socialistic ideals in the first place. The others are subjective in nature and absolutely impossible to place the burden on the health care system individually. |
I actually meant to include the fact that this article was 9 years old in my earlier post, a not insignificant factor.
One thing to note though is that the initial ranking posted in this thread was Health System Performance, which is only part of the broader, Health Performance Rank. So the distribution of financing, responsivenes, health system performance etc combine to the Health Performance Rank.
They don't give details as to how they assess each category but some of them such as DALE (disability adjusted life expectancy) and overall level of health are not that subjective and are in fact based on mathematics, and not just someone's judgement. As for the burden of disease being largely lifestyle determined, this doesn't matter so much, as 'lifestyle disease' is a major burden for most western countries. Furthermore you can't draw a clear delineation between lifestyle disease and other kinds of disease. In the end it is a function of the medical system to treat all of these people.
So while this list is old and may not be perfect, coming from the WHO it's probably the best we can hope to get at this time. Different criteria may push the US slightly higher or slightly lower on the rankings but it's not going to make it number 1. The assumption by some Americans that the US is best at everything by default is not conducive to progress, including in the medical system.
People's insistance on making this a political issue not within the scope of what i want to say. Whether improvement is made through socialising healthcare, making private care more affordable or a combination of the two doesn't really matter to me. Surely the end goal must be to provide the best possible healthcare within a reasonable budget that is affordable for most or all of the population.
