Australia has good rankings, but would have ranked higher if our government spent more per capita! and here you only get taxed for healthcare purposes if you earn over 50,000 a year and dont already have private health insurance (for things like glasses, dental etc)

The poor people who live in your country don't seem to agree.  The life Nintendoman lives is roughly the life the homeless live in our country.  It's horrible.

The way the healthcare and social welfare systems are poorly run in USA. It does not surprise me at all there are such high crime rates in America.

Some people have to commit crimes to survive in a vicious dog eat dog world that is USA. America has no compassion or empathy for the people who are in the lower end of the socio-economic class system.

On one hand USA is the land of opportunity where anyone can become rich and famous if they work hard and have lucky breaks. On the other hand America has over 40 million forgotten homeless people living on the filthy urban streets.

*Highwaystar101 checks wallet and moths fly out*

Yeah, we all agree, funny that.

Yes, but this is what I meant about the difference between people who believe in socialism vs capitalism in the other thread.

There now is a standard, but that standard is worse for the poor even, then before we had a standard. The poor and the upper-middle class now get roughly the same education. In capitalism,  the upper-middle class would have a lot better education, and the poor would have a better education as well, just not as good as the upper-middle class have.

Is it better for everyone to be the same, or everyone be better at different rates? A Capitalist says better is better. Look at you, and where you would have been in a different system. A Socialist says as long as we are all in the same boat, it's better. Even if that boat is far worse then the boats each individual would be in.

In the US, healthcare as an emergency service is already given to you by law. The only thing up for discussion, is should you have to pay for it.

If you are homeless and have a gunshot wound, every Hospital in the US is required to treat you. There is no debtors prison in the US. All not paying your bill will do is put you in a situation where no one will loan you money.

Is being loaned money now a right that needs to be protected?

To expand on my above post. Healthcare as expected by those that want to socialize it, would be the same as expecting the fire department to come to your house, and make sure you have followed all the safely procedures. If you have flammable building materials, they would replace them.

The police would come to your house and install a security system if they thought yours was not up to standards.

Should the Government pay for these things as well?

Until you start thinking as the collection of dollars as burden on the people of the country, your political views will always be swayed towards socialism. When all you see is the good taxes do when you spend them, and not the bad they do with you collect them, of course you will want to do good things with the money.

It's the same as thinking killing an animal for food is worse then going to the grocery store and buying meat. They both come from the same place :)

All I can say is do what I did. Go bust your ass for 20 years to climb your way up to upper-middle class, only to have the government take away 1/3 of what you worked so hard for, so others don't have to work, and see if you still think "it's just a tax".

P.S. your dad is a smart guy ;)

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.

Except that healthcare (for the most part) is not an emergency service ...

People make choices which allow their body to deteriorate over long periods of time to a level where it becomes an emergency, they then are faced with expensive care to return them to the pre-emergency status quo, and then they have years of amazingly expensive care in an attempt to reverse the damage that they have done. There is minimal cost (and in some cases massive savings) in an individual preventing the most common and costly illnesses, and there are massive costs associated with repairing the damage from their choices.

If people took care of themself, healthcare costs would be around 1/4 to 1/3 their current cost and the majority of those costs would be associated with unpreventable illnesses, injuries, and preventative healthcare and the system would be great for everyone regardless of who ran the system ... In contrast, while people still refuse to protect their own health and we develop new long term (and expensive) treatments to keep people with preventable illnesses alive longer costs will continue to skyrocket and the healthcare system will be poor for everyone regardless of who runs the system.