This subject area (and story) are littered with anecdotal data. Makes for great reading, but I'm not so sure it makes for good material for public debate.<p>Most interesting were the life expectancy numbers, which if I remember correctly, are skewed in the U.S. due to violent death. Taking out the chance that you're going to get shot in a liquor store holdup, the life expectancy numbers are very close, perhaps even showing an edge for the U.S. (I don't have a link closeby, sorry)<p>In fact, looking at life expectancy worldwide and spending, it looks like people are living to about the same age in the industrial world regardless of the type of health care program they have. This, of course, doesn't address quality-of-life issues.<p>If people live about the same amount everywhere, then why does the U.S. spend twice as much? And that money spent across the board. In other words, it's not that public health care has any cost effectiveness to it, Americans everywhere are spending twice as much.<p>If I had to guess, I'd say it comes at the end of life -- a huge amount of medical expenses go into that last six months. If you cut those expenses off and made them more managed (rationed?) I bet you'd end up with very similar figures.<p>At the end of the day, if you make health care into something that you go to a politician to fix, you do a lot of interesting things to a democracy. Now might be a good time to think those through, instead of just pointing out how broken things are (they are broken) I favor an immediate, simple solution without government control that tries a few simple changes instead of a complex, intricate solution that few understand and fewer could fix if it didn't work. Do simple things repeatedly and fail often. Don't engineer a paperwork version of a nuclear submarine and then expect to be sailing it around the world next week.