Well, we have an education thread. So here's the healthcare thread.

From the basic statistics, the US spends more per capita on healthcare than any other country in the world, and yet it's ranked 37th in the world in terms of overall health performance by the WHO.

The USA has the 41st highest infant mortality rate in the world, lower even than Cuba (though I don't trust Cuba's figures). But still. 41st?

Women are 70% more likely to die in childbirth in the USA than in Europe.

The US has the highest rate of STD infection in the developed world. At current rates, 1/4 of adults in the US will contract some sort of STD in their lifetime.

So the obvious question is, where the heck is all that money going? I know that it is typically said that a lot of the money goes to technological development and research, but how much? What percentage? And why isn't there enough left over to deal adequately with such basic problems as women dying in childbirth? We aren't talking about expensive chemotherapy and triple heart bypasses for senior citizens here.

Most of the money goes to profit. The mix of non-profit to for-profit hospitals is about even and shifting ever more towards for-profit. All insurance companies (HMOs especially) are for-profit. I'm pretty sure those 'healthcare costs' include money spent on health insurance by the public and a lot goes to needless buearucratic overhead in both hospitals and health insurance corporations. These corporations also spend a lot of money on lawyers to insure they never have to pay out money to hospitals.

What bugs me is that the same "conservatives" that whine of bloat in government almost never whine of the same bloat in other sectors of the country.

You also forgot to mention that since the US voted to remove price caps of perscription drugs, it costs upwards of 7 times as much to make an American well as a Canadian or European. Let's here it for Congress and the Senate looking out for our interests! Yay!

A lot of it is also simple gross overcapacity. In well to do areas, there are way too many expensive facilities opened on a per capita basis; for the simple reason that the rich have gilt edged insurance policies and can waste vast amounts of money on needless procedures.

Case in point. Here in Manhattan there are so many MRIs that it's not unusual to hear that someone with a sore ankle was stuck in one for `diagnostic' reasons on their initial visit. Each of these MRIs is supposed to turn a profit, after all; so every excuse is taken to use them, and all of it is absolute waste.

On the other end; most red states have one or two MRI machines, period. People who need them have to wait on line and travel long distances, in a very Canadian way (which, supposedly, doesn't happen here). Happily enough; this one device pretty much mirrors all medical investment in the US; nobody gives a damn about diseases of the poor, because it doesn't pay to. So the poor die much sooner than they probably should.

Btw; Cuba is probably telling the truth, Kea. They have disposable surpluses of basic care physicians; so the kind of medical treatment that keeps babies from dying is widely available there (unlike the US). Advanced treatment is thin on the ground; but gross successes or failures of public health have almost nothing to do with advanced treatment anyway.

Whatever your opinions on Castro and the revolution, Cuba's acheivements in basic public health are astounding. It's perfectly believable that their infant mortality is lower than the States. I don't have the exact figures on me, but Cuba has more doctors per capita than any other country in the Western Hemisphere, by some considerable margin.

The concept of health care for profit is still a ridiculous one in my opinion. The establishment of the NHS was, as far as I'm concerned, the best thing ever done by any British government.

I think STD are more a socal problem then a heathcare one, I mean look at american culture, sex is every where, yet how much do you see about the risks of std's? Very litte, I have no idea about you could go about fixing that, maybe crack down the music and movie industrys, but if the goverment tried that they would just call apon there right to free speech.

I don't think it's quite that simple, though - at least some of it has to do with the squeamish attitude of the mass media towards non-prurient sex information. Leering pictures and discussions of sex lives of celebrities and soap stars are fine, but discussion of STDs and protective measures are considered invitations to SIN. Odd mixture of voyeurism and Puritanism.
But, of course it is both a social AND a health care problem. And we're all paying one way or the other.

The money mostly is lost in the byzantine beaurocracy it's supposed to pass through - a problem inherent in all services, be they public or private. More so the public ones, of course, because there's less incentive for efficiency.

Really? I'd say the opposite, where government money is being spent. If a government is paying a private company (like and HMO) to treat people it's most likely that it will be gouged by the company.

In Australia, we are moving from a public health dominated system with private hospials for people who chose to go that way and toward a public-healthcare-as-a-last-resort system, which is having horrifying effects.

Waiting lists out the wazoo, doctor recruitment down to billy-oh, nurses leaving the industry in droves, hospital capacity falling, emergency rooms permanently on ambulance bypass.

The current federal government sem to be aiming squarely for an American style health care system which fair stands my hair on end.

The entire justification for supporting American style health care in one sentence, for your amusement and edification. Are you ready? Here goes:

Private insurance companies can afford truly massive bribes; civil servants don't pay any.

But....but.... we don't have a persidential electoral system.

Our system is supposed to be less succeptible to corruption, so why screw-over the public's health if you'er not in a position to benifit from all the resultant bribes?

Even if there is no way for cash to be converted into political power; it's still cash. Australia would not be the first place to have a politician line his own pocket in exchange for deliberately instituting a bad policy, you know.

Other Western nations are exposed to the same sorts of pop culture that Americans are, their teenagers have sex at similar rates, and yet they have much lower STD infection rates. They must do a better job of teaching teenagers about safe sex in schools. They also have more widespread family planning services.

And I'm pretty sure that the deeper levels of poverty you get in the US have something to do with it. HIV is the leading cause of death in black women. If you live in a community where finding a man may be the key to your short-term economic survival, but half the men are unavailable because they're in jail, that probably encourages risky behaviour and a steep discounting of long-term risks.

I feel that our Prime Minister just has a passion for user pays. And thinks the sun shines out George Dubbyah's arse, which is why he wears sunglasses when he's puckering up to kiss it.

Also all the states of Australia have Labor governments, and they're the ones responsible for administrating the hospitals, so if the federal govenment does everything in it's power to sabotage and underfund public hospitals, it both makes Labour look bad and boosts the case for private healthcare.