Opps I've just checked the newly updated health care rankings and they have changed.

Unbelievably we now rank 37th in health care and embarrassingly 46th in "Infant Mortality". Health Care in America is sub-par and yet far too many fight changes to our broken system.

I just googled “health care ranking” and 2^nd from the top of the search result is a website run by a guy named Photius Coutsoukis. The website even states WHO stopped doing the ranking since 2000 because of the complexities of such ranking. The data is at least 10 years old!!! People in this country can complain all they want about how awful its health system is but US still leads the world in 1^st class heath care. Foreign dignitaries and Middle East sultans routinely make visits to the US for their important health care. I wonder why they are not going to San Marino (3^rd) and Andorra (4^th). It is obvious that there are at the very least some faults with the rankings. And Mike, I don’t know what kind of job you have but do you never make a mistake ??? Anyone who has never made a mistake on the job please come forward. Sure when the doctors make a mistake there is life on the line. However, it is always interesting to me how a surgery that pays a doctor $2,500 if done correctly all of a sudden cost the doctor $10,000,000 in a lawsuit if a mistake was made??? Does anyone have job that fines you personally millions of dollars if you make a mistake??? If the doctors job is that important maybe they should have been paid that much more in the first place, so they only have to operate on one patient per day and not rush between patients in the office.

While we do need radical healthcare change. The rankings you cite have nothing to do with doctor mistakes. The low rankings are caused by lack of primary care especially for infants and pregnant women. Usually one of the key criteria in ranking is access to healthcare. Until we finally move to a universal coverage, our rankings are going to be low.

The mistakes made are more common in teaching hospitals, even good ones, because of the number of people in training that have not yet learned the right way to do things. Even so, expect some "fault-finding committee" to start writing rules that will increase paper work and time between cases that will not have any impact on mistakes made by doctors in training.

As far as infant deaths are concerned, different countries count them differently. Some countries will not call a birth a "live birth" until the baby has survived 24 hours. The same goes for other statistics. They are not black and white. Oversite is different in different countries as well. Things that are designated as mistakes in one country are entirely overlooked in another.

If you think that the comparisons are fair and the statistics are accurate, as Mike states, you should think again.

Look closely at what the Institute of Medicine calls mistakes and you will see that they are not living in the real world.

Anyone can publish a report that states that they are number 1 and everyone else is inferior. That does not make it so. Until international standards are established and reported honestly this type of report does nothing but undermine what is actually true.

Todd,

Forget the WHO our own CIA also ranks nations in these categories and these are open to the public. Check out how we rank ourselves.... you will find their rankings (The CIA) are the one's I have quoted.

Wrong. Our healthcare system is very good at high tech, cutting edge procedures and treatments. The trouble is access. If you dont have insurance or if your insurance wont pay for the treatment then it does little good. Our system does not provide good primary, prenatal care and pediatric care for the general population. The issue again is access.

The other issue is that our overall healthcare costs far exceed other countries as a percent of GDP with continued and rapid inflation as well.

BEST is relative.

We have the best money can buy. No money or really good insurance then you get poor health care.

Our health care in this country is rationed by our Health Care Industry. At almost 60 years of age, I can easily remember when I could go to any doctor I wanted to and any hospital or specialist. Now we have our insurance companies telling us who we can see and what hospitals are covered, even if these providers aren't what we would choose, especially if it were a life threatening illness or disease. It's always about money...........not always about proper care.

As an old friend of mine used to say about cheap people or businesses: "Cheapness, recommends!"

The American health care system is good -it's just way too expensive for the end product it provides. Other countries do a much better job at providing high quality health care at a cost that is a much lower percent of GDP. No one out there wants to emulate the American system.

Having a system that is better than Saudi Arabia is not saying much. And foreigners are not necessarily all that savvy about who they select for their health care providers. The most notable was the Shaw of Iran who had DeBakey do his staging laparotomy for lymphoma. He died from post-op complications.

RDH: Historically (for the past 50 years atleast) they have been "savvy" enough to choose Massachusetts General Hospital Doctors and the Phillips House for themselves and their concubines. They used to take up an entire floor.

The Saudis have ALWAYS known exactly where to go in the US for the BEST health care.

RDH he isnt comparing the US to Saudi Arabia, he is just saying if the US is really ranked 26th or whatever then wouldn't it make sense for the King to pick any of those other 26 countries rather then come ours. He was making a valid point

Ram, like I said before, look at your own jobs and see if no one makes any dumb mistakes. Look to your own field to see if there aren't substandard work being done or lack of quality work. Tell me if in your field there aren't well trained people or people "obviously in the wrong field". As you have so well said it is a "crap shoot" whether you buy a lemon car, malfunctioning computer, house or a skyscraper for that matter that isn't built exactly to standard. People who choose to work in health care isn't inherently superior to you and me. They are the same as you and your co-workers. Human beings aren't perfect we make some dumb headed mistakes. If you want a perfect or even near perfect docs, nurses, pharmacists, and so on...we gonna need a lot more money for heath care.

When cars are lemons, the fact is eventually made public.

The problem with the medical profession is that these statistics are often hidden in a general scale, and covered up on a personal scale. "Peer review" is secretive, outmoded and based on the presumption that non-physicians could not possibly understand that removing the wrong kidney is simply removing the wrong kidney.

I guess I did not make myself clear; when I used the example of "lemon cars", I did not mean a systemic large scale problems like the brake pedal issue with Toyota. What I meant was a "lemon" car because a specific part of an otherwise fine car was built or assembled badly due to an oversight or a mistake by a particular assembly line worker who was having a bad day. Again OhJoy, I don't want to sound like a recording machine, but people in all fields at times make mistakes. When you make a mistake on the job, hopefully you'll tell your superiors and they discuss ways to correct it and move on. Did you go on to advertise your personal mistake in public? Do attorneys, chefs, architects, engineers, software programmers, contractor, landscape people, auto mechanics, airline pilots make their personal mistakes public??? My statement is true and no one has stated otherwise in this forum: we all make mistakes! You want to make medical mistakes public because the docs and nurses have to be embarrassed further for their mistake?? Or worse maybe they should lose their license and stop working in the field. If we fired every docs, nurses and pharmacists who ever made a mistake; you'd soon have empty hospitals. We will never be mistake free, that doesn't mean we should stop trying, but to condemn an entire field as some sort of secret society full of substandard care providing quacks is so wrong and demeaning. When medical field realizes that there is a system wide error such as past recommendation for post-menopausal hormone replacement therapy for woman, it is immediately made public. We all like to believe that doctors are perfect like God, but they are not. When a floor nurse who makes $40,000 year give a wrong medicine to a patient the result can be devastating to the patient and believe me also to the horrified nurse. Now you want to publicly humiliate the docs and the nurses some more???? Compare this to a secretary who makes the same money as the floor nurse and can correct her mistake with a white-out. Who would ever want to work in a hospital ? National and State department of health has plenty of statistics on specific hospitals. The joint commission and the State Health make unannounced visits to hospitals all the time. I have family members in health care, they would love to be perfect and they are trying to be every day.

If this happened to you, would you be so understanding and complacent?

I am a surgeon. When a fellow surgeon perforated my appendix on the operating table, I can assure you that I did not think of getting the national media to cover the story.

I have given tremendous amounts of myself in the quest to avoid complications. Complacency is never appropriate when another human's life or health are on the line. My point is, the @#$! media needs to shut up about health care because they don't know what the hell they are talking about.

Ad,

I recognize that most surgeons go way out of their way to treat their patients with care; however, if someone operated on the wrong area of my body, I would be more than just a little upset.

Extra care should be taken by everyone involved (including the patient) when a surgery is done on a body part where you have more than one (like legs, vertebrae, etc).

If there were any complications from this surgery, the patient is entitled to some compensation. However, if there were actually complications, this hospital is not on the side of the patient.

Endo,

Perhaps you need to redefine "complications". I saw a patient post-surgery whose wound had come apart. Turns out she was a smoker and restarted her habit 2 days after surgery. That "complication" was the fault of the patient.

Greedy,

That is not a surgical complication.

Stupidity on the patients part should only be covered by the patient.

Wow you must have become a physician, you sound just like most of the ones I meet these days. I will just assume you are a worthless bottom feeder collecting your $$$ from the government through Medicare and Medicaid. "Let them eat cake" indeed. And you take their money, that makes you better than" the degenerates I dealt with"? Your name on this site describes to a tee 90% of the physicians I have met in over a quarter of a century in nursing. Doctors have consistently made nurses look good for decades so I won't cry too loud; everything is relative though. When I became involved in the business end of the hospital, all pretense of patient care was dropped in the name of satisfying the owners of the hospital (i.e. making $$$). I thought this was an aberration until I ran into the same scenario everywhere, non-profits included. And what is the solution for the problems you bring up in your post? You did become a physician for the betterment of mankind, right? I wonder how many physicians spent more of their money on getting a tax break than helping the poor this year? Yes people are to blame for much of their health woes, and we make money off of it, so lets not call them names as if we were third graders at a playground. Let us put patient education and care ahead of making money. Right? I have become very poor trying to do what is right for the patients but I can not choose financial success over people's health and lives.

I will admit that I have met physicians who seemed to have been serious when the took the Hippocratic oath.

Talk about lack of compassion. Methinks your bedside manner needs some work.