First off, let me say that the report was posted primarily to prove a point to Dark: Universal health care is NOT necessarily a bad thing. In this report (which, granted, may not have said it covered quality of care, but more on that later) other countries, including those with universal health care, did better.
DarnYak wrote:The issue isn't with the quality of care, which is why i object to the US being 37th. Seeing the factors listed, there's acutally not a single one about quality of care, it's all about the 'fairness' of the system. The closest one is the adjusted life expectancy, which is also flawed due to being yet another average, failing to take into account the vast numbers of immigrants we get, and especially leaving out the unhealthy lifestyle most Americans choose to have.
I may be missing something here, but people go into the job for two reasons: They want to help people, or, in places like the US, they want to make a lot of money. Me being an optimist, I'd say a lot of people who handle injured people, doctors, surgeons and the like, feel a need to help people. I'd say they would give the best possible care given their equipment. Granted, that's an entirely different argument, but I'm pretty sure they've all got decently high quality of care.
Moving on, if you're not talking about an average, how the hell can you judge anything based on numbers? The larger the sample gets, the more representative it gets, but handling those numbers individually -- let alone actually getting them -- would be painful. You say that the average life expectancy ignores our unhealthy lifestyles, yet I would imagine that if everyone lives an unhealthy lifestyle, the average life expectancy goes down? I don't see as to how you can say that the two are completely independent.
Also, I may be reading a bit of my own intention into this, but they do seem to hint at quality of care. Lemme pull some quotes here.
Responsiveness wrote:The nations with the most responsive health systems are the United States, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Canada, Norway, Netherlands and Sweden. The reason these are all advanced industrial nations is that a number of the elements of responsiveness depend strongly on the availability of resources.
I'm kind of seeing that with more resources available, the quality of care would go up. The more stuff you have, the better you can care for others as you have more resources / doctor. Now, what 'resources' are is somewhat questionable. They never do specify what they are.
Responsiveness wrote:Responsiveness includes two major components. These are (a) respect for persons (including dignity, confidentiality and autonomy of individuals and families to decide about their own health); and (b) client orientation (including prompt attention, access to social support networks during care, quality of basic amenities and choice of provider).
I don't know about yourself, but personally I see prompt attention as being pretty important. The other thing is the quality of basic amenities increases the quality of care, for any improvement increases the quality of care.
And Yak, how do you quantify the unquantifiable? (Bonus points for anyone who grabs the Dilbert comic of "Dogbert the Quantifier"). How in the world does one quantify quality of care? The best I can think of is the amount of equipment and support personnel doctors have, but I would refer you again to the resource availability quote.
Edit: inb4 "Wall of text crits me for over 9000!" or "tl;dr"