unrealist42 wrote:
Pensions and health care for old people and war veterans and limited unemployment benefits had been around for a while in many countries and after the war the socialists had enough political power to extend and expand these policies. There is no question of this.

What you may be missing is that the US entirely financed the recovery of Western Europe after the war and exercised a lot of political power. If US advisors with other views had been sent many of these expanded social policies would have been discouraged and squashed instead of accepted and encouraged.

enkidu wrote:
Thanks for your kindness, calling me an idiot is very urbane of you.

Anyway, I did not imply in any way (for an honest reader) that doctors were saint, simply that they had a conscience, as most human beings, and are aware of their responsibility to their fellow human beings, at least for the vast majority of the doctors.

As for the technology, GE Healthcare, Philips Medical Services, Siemens Medical Solutions or Toshiba sell all over the world, not only to US, and hospitals all over the world have the means to buy their products (possibly more so when they are run by the state) so your rantings about some restrictions about high-tech devices that most likely are not even made in US or by US companies, is absurd. I also don't see any demonstrated link between a great concentration of rich people and outstanding healthcare.
What I see however, once more, is that I just have to take your word to believe the great myth saying that USA has the absolute best hospitals in the world, or even that such a hierarchy makes any sense at all (if it does, it certainly isn't measured by the mortality rate anyway as you implied earlier).

My view, supported by my experience, and a few studies easily available on the net (here is one for instance: http://www.rwjf.org/files/research/qualityquickstrikeaug2009.pdf), is that healthcare quality is overall equivalent in most industrialised countries; I would think that US healthcare in pure quality is good (and I practised it for a while) but not any better than healthcare in France or in Singapore, that I also practised.

wuliheron wrote:

Virtually every human being on the planet has a conscience and some sense of social responsibility so, again, the statement is just so much meaningless rhetoric. Next you'll be telling me they cry over babies starving in Africa and debate what to do about it at their country clubs. Nor was I talking about the "overall" quality of the US healthcare system, I was pointedly talking about a system that is increasingly two tiered and gouging the average person for profit. You can only hide behind words and obscure research for so long when the pharmacutical companies and other involved parties are making record profits during the worst economic downturn since the great depression.