US backs United Nations measure in favor of universal health coverage

The United States has backed a United Nations draft resolution favoring universal healthcare coverage.

The nonbinding measure calls on U.N. member states to ensure citizens' access to health insurance, and was approved by the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday.

Supporters say the draft resolution paves the way for the post-2015 development agenda to include universal health coverage.

Health insurance for all promotes "sustained, inclusive and equitable growth, social cohesion and well-being of the population," the U.N. said.

In 2010, the U.N.'s World Health Organization (WHO) expressed support for President Obama's signature healthcare law, praising it as an "unprecedented achievement" in the global push for health coverage.

10 Surprising Facts about American Health Care

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba649

“Philip Musgrove, the editor-in-chief of the WHO report that accompanied the rankings, calls the figures that resulted from this step “so many made-up numbers,” and the result a “nonsense ranking.” Dr. Musgrove, an economist who is now deputy editor of the journal Health Affairs, says he was hired to edit the report’s text but didn’t fully understand the methodology until after the report was released. After he left the WHO, he wrote an article in 2003 for the medical journal Lancet criticizing the rankings as ‘meaningless.’

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125608054324397621.html

So what’s wrong with the WHO and Commonwealth Fund studies? Let me count the ways.

The WHO judged a country’s quality of health on life expectancy. But that’s a lousy measure of a health-care system. Many things that cause premature death have nothing do with medical care. We have far more fatal transportation accidents than other countries. That’s not a health-care problem.

Similarly, our homicide rate is 10 times higher than in the U.K., eight times higher than in France, and five times greater than in Canada.

When you adjust for these “fatal injury” rates, U.S. life expectancy is actually higher than in nearly every other industrialized nation.

Diet and lack of exercise also bring down average life expectancy.

Another reason the U.S. didn’t score high in the WHO rankings is that we are less socialistic than other nations. What has that got to do with the quality of health care? For the authors of the study, it’s crucial. The WHO judged countries not on the absolute quality of health care, but on how “fairly” health care of any quality is “distributed.” The problem here is obvious. By that criterion, a country with high-quality care overall but “unequal distribution” would rank below a country with lower quality care but equal distribution.

It’s when this so-called “fairness,” a highly subjective standard, is factored in that the U.S. scores go south.

The U.S. ranking is influenced heavily by the number of people — 45 million — without medical insurance. As I reported in previous columns, our government aggravates that problem by making insurance artificially expensive with, for example, mandates for coverage that many people would not choose and forbidding us to buy policies from companies in another state.

Even with these interventions, the 45 million figure is misleading. Thirty-seven percent of that group live in households making more than $50,000 a year, says the U.S. Census Bureau. Nineteen percent are in households making more than $75,000 a year; 20 percent are not citizens, and 33 percent are eligible for existing government programs but are not enrolled.

For all its problems, the U.S. ranks at the top for quality of care and innovation, including development of life-saving drugs. It “falters” only when the criterion is proximity to socialized medicine.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/08/why_the_us_ranks_low_on_whos_h.html

WHO’s Fooling Who? The World Health Organization’s Problematic Ranking of Health Care Systems

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9236

Ahh but they indoctrinate our youth in the Government run or funded univeristry system to see themselves as global rather than U.S or State citizens.

Of course at this point I suppose it makes very little difference whether that foreign despot is in New York, or Washington D.C. They are as oppressive to our individual rights either way.

The left have no intention of permitting freedom to exist anywhere in the globe. They have over the century chased really freedom and self-reliance to the edge of exaction, and they will not let up until it is an unheard of an dead idea everywhere.

No matter what, we can never let them succeed, from the ashes of tyranny we must rise and rise again! Never give up on freedom, never surrender it.

Its ironic too, the reason minorities have such low life expectancy is because so many of them keep killing each other in urban Gang warfare.
This sub-culture facilitated in liberal dominated areas really is killing them. But if you make it thou that, you will probably live as long as anyone else.

The large majorly of so called “whites” simply don’t partispate in that, hence the higher life expectancy.

I know he is also right in the socialism aspect this is a rating criteria in just about every one of these so called “national rating” systems.

Most of the folks that make theses systems have as little concept of what makes for quality of life for the masses as Lenin. To them I suppose a life free for your own choices is no life at all.

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