The U.S. spends more on health care than any other!

This rings home when seeking articles concerning our current health care system in the U.S. I took excerpts from an article written by Dr. Schroeder, published in the New England Journal of Medicine. What do you think???

The United States spends more on health care than any other nation in the world, yet it ranks poorly on nearly every measure of health status. How can this be? What explains this apparent paradox?
The two-part answer is deceptively simple — first, the pathways to better health do not generally depend on better health care, and second, even in those instances in which health care is important, too many Americans do not receive it, receive it too late, or receive poor-quality care.
Among the 30 developed nations that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States ranks near the bottom on most standard measures of health status (One measure on which the United States does better is life expectancy from the age of 65 years, possibly reflecting the comprehensive health insurance provided for this segment of the population.) Among the 192 nations for which 2004 data are available, the United States ranks 46th in average life expectancy from birth and 42nd in infant mortality. It is remarkable how complacent the public and the medical profession are in their acceptance of these unfavorable comparisons, especially in light of how carefully we track health-systems measures, such as the size of the budget for the National Institutes of Health, trends in national spending on health, and the number of Americans who lack health insurance. One reason for the complacency may be the rationalization that the United States is more ethnically heterogeneous than the nations at the top of the rankings, such as Japan, Switzerland, and Iceland. It is true that within the United States there are large disparities in health status — by geographic area, race and ethnic group, and class. But even when comparisons are limited to white Americans, our performance is dismal. And even if the health status of white Americans matched that in the leading nations, it would still be incumbent on us to improve the health of the entire nation.
Although inadequate health care accounts for only 10% of premature deaths, health care receives by far the greatest share of resources and attention. In the case of heart disease, it is estimated that health care has accounted for half of the 40% decline in mortality over the past two decades.
Improving population health would be more than a statistical accomplishment. It could enhance the productivity of the workforce and boost the national economy, reduce health care expenditures, and most important, improve people's lives. But in the absence of a strong political voice from the less fortunate themselves, it is incumbent on health care professionals, especially physicians, to become champions for population health.
Americans take great pride in asserting that we are number one in terms of wealth, number of Nobel Prizes, and military strength. Why don't we try to become number one in health? -Steven A.Schroeder, MD