diggerop wrote:
Currently, Australia spends approx 9% of GDP on medical care. I
believe the US currently spends something like 15% of GDP. Yet
Australians reportedly live on average live 4 years longer than the
average US citizen. Got to be food for thought in that.


More like food for further investigation. True, we spend more of GDP on
health care than most other countries. That's possibly because we can. We
probably spend more on pay-TV, eating out, earth shoes, and other
non-critical items than other countries simply because we can. Some "health
care" in the U.S. is discretionary (think breast implants - although I did
see a recent article complaining that Australia was having to import 1000cc
implants from the U.S. because of a severe in-country shortage...).

Life expectancy is also a poor metric for the efficacy of health care. For
example, most countries count severly premature infant deaths as "stillborn"
(such as France). In the U.S., Herculean efforts are expended on these
unfortunate children. Regrettably, many don't make it and skew the "life
expectancy" tables downward.

A better metric for health care may very well be life expectancy after a
diagnosis. In this category, the U.S. leads. For example, life expectancy of
five years or more after diagnosis of breast cancer is 95% in the U.S. vs.
56% in the U.K. This MAY be due to greater diagnostic capability in the U.S.
than in other places. In that regard, consider: there are more MRI machines
in my town than in all of Canada. Again, we have a greater diagnostic
infrastructure, probably, because we can afford it.

Australian-rules football is plenty tough (I think knives are limited to 6"
or less). But have you ever heard of an MRI machine at an Australian
stadium? Several of our pansy-football stadiums have a machine readily
available.