We keep hearing about how Canada is ranked number 30 in the world in health care, whereas the USA is ranked number 37 in the world, this based on a ranking of the nations done by the WHO in 2000. Yet in 2003 the London School of Hygeine did its own ranking, looking not at Disability Adjusted Life Expectancy which is one of the ways the WHO ranked the nations, but instead focusing according to its authors more closely than WHO on disease and death amenable to health care interventions. THus the London School came up with different rankings the two main rankings produced by WHO in 2000, one of which was a ranking based on Dale and the other of which was a ranking estimating overall health system quality in the various nations.
The London School study shows that the more public sector spending a nation engages in per capita, the better the health system in the nation. This is understandable because the public health sector spending is targetted to produce the kinds of results that are rated favorably in the most sophisticated national health system ranking systems.
The overlooked complexity in the ranking systems, is that a given national health care system's ranking realistically speaking, changes depending upon which economic class in society's point of view you take.
There is a class that can afford health care without using health insurance. There is a class that can afford the private health insurance that provides decent coverage. There is a class that needs government help to be able to afford health insurance that provides decent coverage.
The trick is to look for policies that serve the interests of all of these economic classes, while keeping an eye out for how a government policy could harm or fail to help one class while helping another class.
See:
http://www.angelfire.com/ma/vincemoon/nhcs.htm@2005 David Virgil Hobbs
