I could spend the next several years trying to understand this issue. This page is just a placeholder for me to post links to interesting facts and articles right now.

Problems:

Costs:

• From 1980 to 2007 Spending on healthcare in the U.S. has quadrupled while the overall economy has slightly more than doubled.
  Healthcare expenses went from about 8% of disposable income to over 16%
• The typical family health insurance plan costs $12,000 a year or more.
• Household Health Spending as a Percentage of Personal Income in the U.S. has gone from 4.8% in 1987 to 5.9% in 2003.
• Medicare Household spending on healthcare (Kaiser Family Foundation kff.org/medicare/)
  

  Age	Amount	%
  65-69	$4,069	12.3%
  70-74	$4,185	13.1%
  75-79	$4,420	14.2%
  80+	$4,457	17.2%

• Retirees will need an estimated $635,000 (per couple over age 65) to cover healthcare costs in retirement.

• Nearly 46 million Americans, or 18 percent of the population under the age of 65, were without health insurance in 2007
• Over 8 in 10 uninsured people come from working families.
• The Institute of Medicine, in a series of reports published in 2004, concluded that 18,000 people in the USA die each year because they lack insurance.
• How to pay for healthcare for the uninsured.

An article, "Even the Insured Feel Strain of Health Costs", in the NY Times Sun. May 4, 2008 says:
Health plans can cost $10,000/year with a $1,000 deductible.
In one employer's health plan, employees are obliged to pay up to $4,000 of their families' annual medical bills, on top of about $1,600 a year in premiums. Five years ago, their employer paid all the premiums and they were responsible for only about $2,000 of their familiesŐ medical bills.
They did not say whether the 16% figure in the chart below included an employer's contribution to health insurance.
  >
Deloitte Center for Health Solutions

	US	Canada	France	Cuba
% of GDP	16%	10%	11%
Life expectancy	78	81	81	78
Infant mortality	6.6	4.8	4.3	6.4
Physician Visits	4	5.9	6.4
Preventable Deaths	115	89	76
Obesity	23%	14%	9%

Source:
- Life expectancy - World Health Organization
Accidental deaths, homicides, obesity and infant mortality are higher in the US lowering Life expectancy.

- Infant Mortality (deaths per 1,000 births) at whale.to/a/inf1.html
Teen motherhood is almost three times higher in the U.S. than it is in Canada and teens are more likely to have low birth weight babies which have higher mortality.

- Physician Visits - OECD, 2008

- Preventable Deaths (per 100,000 people) - "Measuring the Health of Nations: Updating an Earlier Analysis" (Health Affairs, Jan./Feb. 2008), Ellen Nolte, Ph.D., and C. Martin McKee, M.D., D.Sc., both of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Health-Care Systems: Lessons From The Reform Experience, 2003

• In countries with public-integrated systems, efficiency-related reforms have included: introducing separate purchaser and provider functions, better alignment of incentives with objectives through contracts, decentralised decision making, greater competition among providers and, more recently, benchmarking against best-performing hospitals. While the positive impact of such policies has most often been weakened by continued central control, tight spending limits and tighter supply constraints than elsewhere, these policies generally have been sustained, despite subsequent reforms in many countries.
• Experiments with competition among providers have been less successful and reforms have been reversed in those countries where they were introduced.

Links:
O.E.C.D (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development)
  Health-Care Systems: Lessons From The Reform Experience, 2003

The National Coalition on Health Care (NCHC)
Statistics at HealthcareProblems.org

Anti Government Healthcare:
Myths About Socialized Medicine at Accuracy in Media (AIM)

Pro Government Healthcare:
Medicare for All: Explanation of Single-Payer
John Geyman: "Facts" About American Health Care Revisited
US Medical System: The Worst in 19 Industrialized Nations

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