Given that we’re in full swing of the election season (I think Bill is just two inches from falling over the edge), I thought I’d stir the waters with a post on a study released today regarding health care. Since my wife is a doctor whose patient population is generally underserved, stories about national health care catch our household’s attention rather easily. Will Dunham of Reuters reports on a study by Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine that found,

France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday.

If the U.S. health care system performed as well as those of those top three countries, there would be 101,000 fewer deaths in the United States per year, according to researchers writing in the journal Health Affairs….

“I wouldn’t say it (the last-place ranking) is a condemnation, because I think health care in the U.S. is pretty good if you have access. But if you don’t, I think that’s the main problem, isn’t it?” Nolte said in a telephone interview.

Senior Vice President Cathy Schoen of the Commonwealth Fund (who backed the study) said in a statement,

“The fact that other countries are reducing these preventable deaths more rapidly, yet spending far less, indicates that policy, goals and efforts to improve health systems make a difference.”

WebMD has the countries’ rankings.

I don’t think I’m alone in my view that our health care system is not the best it could be. While I value and would not want to lose the innovation that the competition our system encourages, I am concerned that we are paying more per capita on health care than any other nation and yet we are lagging behind in stopping preventable deaths, due at least partly to the growing inability to have adequate access to health care given that our insurance system is becoming more expensive. I’m not one to back single payer medicine outright, but I wonder if there is something that we can learn from those systems as they appear to be doing better than we are in preventing unnecessary deaths.