That could have been said by my dad too.

My dad busted his hump for years too. He was born to a poor family and he spent 9 years at university to get a good job. He pays 40% tax and 12.5% national insurance, that's over half his wages and he still gets well into a six figure salary. But what he forgets is that people like him had to start from somewhere and I'm sure you are in the same boat. He always complains about people scrounging from the NHS and taking his money for education, but he fails to see that I am one of the people that he supports through taxes and he was also once in my situation.

I plan to work for 20, 30, 40 to get from my current poor state to upper middle class. And I hope that on the way I can still appreciate how I was supported by government funded health care when I was ill and there was no chance of me even paying for insurance. I hope that I can still appreciate how all my years at university were funded by people like what I become. Because I would not have stood a chance of achieving what I, or my dad, could have achieved if it wasn't for the opportunites Iwe were given by the tax payer. And I think that the appreciation for tthis gets lost at some point

All I can say is that in 30 years or so and I'm earning six figures *Crosses fingers* I can appreciate how my education and healthcare was paid for when I could not afford it that gave me the opportunity to get this far.

P.S. I am not supported by my Dad much for financial stuff, outside of taxes... (But he's awesome all the same)

@highwaystar

will your dad be paying 50% after todays budget? from 2011?

I would imagine so. He's talked about moving to Dubai in order to avoid taxes, But I think it would be a very bad idea

lol, yeah, thats a long way away, my parents both earn between 20-30k a year, so theyre ok under the budget

I believe that is what they call PWNED

LOL. Someone shows a nine-year old ranking that has been since then recalled and expects someone to believe him... Honestly, socialism never works and health care is not exception. Affirm what people write above me.

Your government has done its work well, if you feel there is no way for you to succeed without them.

What I find interesting is the life expectancy between #1 (France) and #37 (US).

France: 80.98 Years
US: 78.11

All those taxes, and much better HC for 2 more years? Yeah, huge difference.

Methinks that America's healthcare problems aren't due to the lack of socalization, but lack of caring among the general populace to be healthy. We have a much higher obesity rate than France.

For example, our obesity rates are 3 times higher than France (30.6% vs. 93.%). Do you think a lack of socalized healthcare causes this? If not, then we're not in the same boat, as obesity causes all kinds of issues and woes for the HC system.

Reform the US system. Don't socialize it, because if that's done, then our system will become overburdened and totally ruined. It works in your countries because you have an overall better community of citizens that are more active in their own personal healthcare. If we have it, then a guy that is fit will be paying more out of pocket for Mr. fatty that prefers eating 3 BK Whoppers and leaving the health bill to someone else.

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.

I'm not disputing the fact that the rate of obesity is probably much higher in the USA than France, but i wonder where that figure of 93.4% came from.   Possibly it could be the rate of people overweight and obese but even then it's higher than any statistic i've ever seen before.

Assuming an average height of 6 feet (for males), this would mean than 93.4 percent of the population weighed 220lbs or above.