No wonder

I can see why it's taking so long to get health care reform in this country. It's already so good!! To wit:

"A 2008 report by the Commonwealth Fund, "Deaths Before Age 75 from Donditions That Are at Least Partially Modifiable with Effective Medical Care," concluded that the United States is the worst of the developed countries on this measure. Among nineteen wealthy countries, the United States ranked nineteenth in curing people who could be cured with decent care....The number of people under seventy-five who die from curable illness was almost twice as high in the United States as in the countries that do the best on this measure: France, Japan and Spain....Americans with diabetes die younger than diabetics in any of the other countries....Among those nine rich[est] nations, the per-capita rate of "Deaths Due to Surgical or Medical Mishaps" was the highest by far in the USA...."

For "healthy life expectancy at age 60," a measure that "predicts not just how many more years a sixty-year-old can expect to live, but how long she can expect to feel pretty good...before the onset of predictable ailments of the aged, such as Alzheimer's disease and rheumatoid arthritis,...we're in the basement. Among twenty-three countries in a 2006 survey by the Commonwealth Fund, the United States was tied for last." (32-33)

The Healing of America, T. R. Reid