COTW: No Bang for the Healthcare Buck

As the United States military moves expensive hardware pieces over the globe in a game of "Risk" against the Russians, who believe it or not also have "national security interests" of their own such as an entrance into the Mediterranean, US Person chooses to present yet another example of the misdirected resources caused by the profit motive: healthcare in America. It is well known by now the United States spends more money per capita for health care than almost every developed countries in the world (2nd behind Switzerland where everything is expensive). The results in terms of efficiency measures like life expectancy and incidence of disease we are near the bottom (46th). Counties like Iran, China and Algeria do a better job, as does Australia and Switzerland! Bloomberg, hardly a communist influenced corrupt organization, did another ranking of forty-eight countries that confirms these facts. Look at the charts:

To put the charts into words, the world's richest country spends the most (17.2% of GDP) on health to receive the least amount of care. That's what for-profit medicine and private insurance gets you. Socialized medicine would be a godsend to most businesses since they would be relieved of the escalating expense of providing employee health benefits, and a single payer could drive down costs they do choose to cover in supplemental programs. Under the current chaos, businesses engage in socially backward avoidance schemes like using cheap part-time labor with no benefits. So the next time your heart swells with pride over the carrier "Nimitz" moving around the far side of the globe at great expense in defense of your 'security' ask yourself, what security are we talking about?