US ranks 37th in health care , behind Dominica and Costa Rica at 35th and 36th, just before Slovenia and Cuba at 38th and 39th.

To imply that ordinary Americans stating their opinion of their own health care system are too naive or idealistic to notice the declining standards is to insult their intelligence. I think their perceptions ARE reality. What is not reality is the plethora of pseudo-articles planted in the all-too-compliant-press by big corporations claiming that, say, Canadian or British, or any other single payer system is a horror show. This is where American perception does not match reality. I think anyone who is paying attention to the subject knows that most Americans don't knock themselves out informing themselves about the realities of life outside the US. (As an aside, my dental hygienist said to me, after I said I was just back from Thailand, "Do they still wear bones in their noses?" I thought at first that she was joking, but, sadly, no. My dentist said "Thailand? Is that the island the Chinese want back? I didn't know you could go there.")

If you do the Google search and read the studies in date order, you will see that the more recent the study, the worse the satisfaction. I call that a trend.

One of the articles is headlined by a phrase mentioning that health care is not at the top of the political agenda, and even if it were, that's the future we hope for, not the reality we live with.

If you do any research at all on health care costs and availability in the US, you will find that administration costs count for 1/4th to 1/3 of the total, far higher than any other system in the world. This is just more corporate greed and mis-use of power, one of the hallmarks of the era for the US. By the way, I recently read a story from the doctor's point of view, maybe from the AMA, that rated how properly or poorly they got paid by the various payers. Medicare got a 98% rating and the private orgs got from 20-40-something% (I could be off a few points here- 60 year-old brain and all, so shoot me).

I would agree with you that too much is spent on babies with severe birth defects, but we can't be aborting "life" can we? Quality of which be damned! Ronald Reagan put that into effect with a signing statement that also included a "spy on your co-worker" clause that provided a hotline for the uber-religious or just spiteful hospital worker to rat out anyone they thought wasn't putting enough effort into saving, say a baby with its brain outside its skull, costing about a million a day, and costing the family a great deal more in the long run. And we know what happened to Jack Kerkorian for trying to help those who don't want to be forced to live a long but very low-quality of life. All brought to us by folks who suffer from the delusion that they know god better than anyone else, a sickness for which no cure has been found.

I guess maybe you'd be encouraged by a policy statement put out recently on how the brown shirts (Homeland Security) has decided to ration healthcare if there is an epidemic, say of bird flu, which is another planted story, priming us to accept more loss of civil and constitutional rights. Burn victims will not get treatment, nor will the elderly. It doesn't say what they'll decide to do with birth defected newborns - maybe eat them? Here's a few of their recommendations-----------------------------

The idea is to try to make sure that scarce resources - including ventilators, medicine and doctors and nurses - are used in a uniform, objective way, task force members said. Their recommendations appear in a report appearing Monday in the May edition of Chest, the medical journal of the American College of Chest Physicians. "If a mass casualty critical care event were to occur tomorrow, many people with clinical conditions that are survivable under usual health care system conditions may have to forgo life-sustaining interventions owing to deficiencies in supply or staffing," the report states. To prepare, hospitals should designate a triage team with the Godlike task of deciding who will and who won't get lifesaving care, the task force wrote. Those out of luck are the people at high risk of death and a slim chance of long-term survival. But the recommendations get much more specific, and include: _People older than 85. _Those with severe trauma, which could include critical injuries from car crashes and shootings. _Severely burned patients older than 60. _Those with severe mental impairment, which could include advanced Alzheimer's disease. _Those with a severe chronic disease, such as advanced heart failure, lung disease or poorly controlled diabetes. ----------------------------------------------------------- Many developed countries consider health care a human right. I agree. Running our society as if it were a business is not only dumb, it's also immoral. A just society is concerned with people, not just maximizing profits for the few.

with your first premise about expectations. it is tempting to ask everyone else to pay for your medical care. until someone starts telling you that your condition is too costly....please give me freedom from dmv healthcare....

when government grows, liberty yields, thomas jefferson