In 2006, the Journal of the American Medical Association published an article that compared the health of people in the United States and Great Britain. People have asked me for the reference, and I am giving it below.
This study compared people ages 55 to 65 in the United States and Britain by income and health. They found that in both countries, the richest third of the people were healthier than the middle third who were healthier than the poorest third. The surprise was that the richest third of Americans had somewhat worse health than the poorest third of the British people. This, in spite of the fact that, at the time, the US expenditure on health care was $5274 per capita while the corresponding British expenditure was a much lower $2164.
The reference for the article is: James Bank et. al., JAMA, vol. 295, pages 2037-2045, May 3, 2006. With this information, you can obtain the complete text from the JAMA web site: http://jama.ama-assn.org/... JAMA stands for Journal of the American Medical Association.
For a plain English description of the study, you can go to Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times for May 5, 2006.
A few of my own comments:
- American health care is not the best in the world.
- The British can keep costs down because they do not have to give 30-40% of their health care dollars to insurance company paperwork, profits and the expenses associated with denial of care. In the United States today, this amounts to approximately $600,000,000,000, or $600 billion dollars per year, or $6 trillion dollars over ten years, far more than the cost of any proposed health reform proposal. This is enough money to give everyone health care, and it would be available under a single payer plan such as HR676.