Quote from: cruikshank on November 02, 2011, 10:43:34 PM

Quote from: P4man on November 02, 2011, 10:03:21 PM

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Come on New Zealand had 4 million people. The Netherlands has 16 million. California and the US are pushing those respective numbers in illegal immigrants alone.

So what, the bigger the scale, the more efficient you could make it. Its harder to get costs down on small scale, a country like the Netherlands has no leverage over pharmaceutical companies compared to the US. If you can do it on a scale as small as that, surely you could do it on a state level in the US?

Not only that, the US is far wealthier than New Zealand and the Netherlands combined:

United States GDP - $ 14,660,000,000,000

New Zealand GDP - $ 117,800,000,000

Netherlands GDP - $ 676,900,000,000

And to boot: Monaco, highest listed life expectancy, had a substantially lower GDP compared to the US: $ 976,300,000 (2006 est.)

You do realize that noting the fact that Americans are, on average, much wealthier than other nations tempers some of the differences in actual monetary costs, right? For example, if I make the American median income (around $31K per year, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income) even a rate of 3 times the cost of care means that, as a realtive percentage of my income, my health care costs less of my income than literally half or more of the planet, even if I had no insurance at all and paid every dime from my own pocket. New Zealand rings in at about $20K per year, while the Netherlands rings in at about $24K.

The median income of the entire planet is only about $7K per year (http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2007/10/07/average_earnings_worldwide/) and that includes Americans. That means that Americans near the poverty level (In 2009, in the United States of America, the poverty threshold for a single person under 65 was US$11,161; -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold) earn almost twice as much as half the population on Earth, while also being with public transit distance of some of the best hospitals on Earth. As has already been noted, they get 'mandatory' treatment whether they can pay for it or not. You can't honestly expect that the lower half of the rest of the world could have access to nearly the same care, even if they could tax their own citizenship to pay for it at a third the cost that the US pays for.