[Bitman]

Originally Posted by sugarpop

Donnie Deutsche said the other day on Morning Joe the best way to pay for health care would be to get the top 100,000 people to pay an additional $100,000 in taxes.

I'll take that bet: $100,000*100,000 = $10 billion. There are a quarter billion people in the states, so that gives us .. $40 per person per year. Problem solved.

France does have the best health care system in the world, according to the WHO.
http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html

I recommend you read that link, it's quite informative. Especially this gem:

Originally Posted by that article

The World Health Organization's ranking of the world's health systems was last produced in 2000, and the WHO no longer produces such a ranking table, because of the complexity of the task.

So the WHO posted a questionable report, then just gave up altogether. But wait, why does a page on "photius.com" have a "geography.org" header? Maybe we should visit the actual press release. Sure enough, near the top, they report that the US is number 37. But if you keep reading ...

Originally Posted by The Who

Responsiveness: The nations with the most responsive health systems are the United States, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Canada, Norway, Netherlands and Sweden.

US is first, France is missing.

Originally Posted by The Who

Fairness of financial contribution: ... Colombia was the top-rated country in this category, followed by Luxembourg, Belgium, Djibouti, Denmark, Ireland, Germany, Norway, Japan and Finland.

France and US are both missing.

Let's see if Google can tell us what's so great about France. How about this one?

The working population has twenty percent of their gross salary deducted at source to fund the social security system.

How much health care could you buy for 20% of your income? If you put that in a 401K, you think it might cover your retirement? Boy, I bet those doctors are well paid.

However, 56 percent of physicians work in private practices because of the difficult working conditions in hospitals.

Yikes. Well, how about this one:

The French system is also not inexpensive. At $3,500 per capita it is one of the most costly in Europe, yet that is still far less than the $6,100 per person in the United States.

That's not so bad. Unless it's on top of the 20% social security tax. Just one more:

Hospital facilities, although greatly expanded since World War II, are still considered inadequate. Doctors tend to be concentrated in the cities and are in short supply in some rural areas. The death rate, life expectancy, and infant mortality rate are similar to those of other industrialized nations.

While the US system may be troubled, but France is certainly not the utopia you make it out to be.