In a Commonwealth Fund-supported study comparing preventable deaths in 19 industrialized countries, researchers found that the United States placed last.
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Measuring the Health of Nations: Updating an Earlier Analysis"... compared international rates of "amenable mortality"- that is, deaths from certain causes before age 75 that are potentially preventable with timely and effective health care. In addition to the U.S., the study included 14 Western European countries, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. According to the authors, if the U.S. had been able reduce amenable mortality to the average rate achieved by the three top-performing countries, there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths annually by the end of the study period.

For example in Japan, according to a bit on the PBS News Hour I watched about a month ago, the doctor's union and the government sit down and negotiate prices for every imaginable procedure. Since these prices will be applied to every procedure in the country, the government negotiating team has quite a bit of leverage. The US government does this to a limited extent with regards to people covered by some specific programs (e.g. Medicare/Medicaid) but law prevents it from doing it in other areas (e.g. Medicare's new prescription drug program).

Another issue is that we spend government health care dollars stupidly - dropping millions, for example, so a single illegal immigrant can receive 4 different transplants over the course of her life, while not properly funding clinics that would help hundreds of such immigrants.

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Has anybody seen my clue? I know I had it when I came in here.

Among this departments duties is to process prescription claims to insurance companies for doctors affiliated with us who see patients in our clinic. To do this through our practice management software requires at least 5 steps and 3 separate companies. Requests are put into the system and converted to a text file of some kind, then "faxed" to a third party processing company using some special piece of software. This company then passes it through a second processing company for reasons that no one is really quite sure of, who then passes it (we believe) to the actual insurance companies.

Now you might say "Well your practice management software sucks", and you'd be right, but apparently this kind of thing is not that uncommon. It's the second processing company that fascinates me the most. As far as we can tell their only function in life is to move text files from the original processing company to insurance companies. I mean it's literally Tom Smykoski from Office Space come to life.

This is what I never get about the whole "Oh the bureaucracy will be so horrible with national health care" argument. Could it really be that worse? Watching some of the insurance fights Jenn has had going through the infertility stuff the past few years; granted we were not dealing with life threatening stuff and you expect a little insurance flack for something like that but still.

American doctors are more likely to be ruined by a lawsuit and so have to carry massive malpractice insurance, driving up costs.

For-profit healthcare drives up patient cost.

In Ontario, the government tells doctors how much they charge a patient for services.  Government control keeps costs low.