Also so much of US taxes goes to military, which countries like Canada benefit from, in a sense our military spending subsidizes Canadian healthcare.
It's worth pointing out too, that the US government actually pays more per capita for healthcare than most governments that provide universal healthcare, so US taxpayers pay more and need private insurance..
The WHO ratings were more about politics than healthcare.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB125608054324397621?mg=...
When you drill down into specifics, like survival rates for cancer, the US healthcare system is the best in the world, BAR NONE:
http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@epidemiologysurvei...
This quote and the study it talks about is relevant, because it directly aims at the access and quality of treatment for the poor and middle class.
>In 2000, the World Health Organization ranked the French health system as the best over all in the world. Do you agree?
>I question the W.H.O. methodology, which has serious problems with data reliability and the standards of comparison. A study I would take more seriously is one published last year by Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee in the journal Health Affairs. They examined avoidable mortality — that is, deaths whose risk of occurrence would be far lower if the population had access to appropriate health care interventions. In that study, based on data for the year 2000, France was also ranked No. 1, with the lowest rate of avoidable deaths. The United States was last, in 19th place, with the highest rate of avoidable deaths. That’s a severe indictment of our health care system in my judgment and calls attention, quite justifiably, to the high performance of the French health care system. http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/health-car....
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/cancer-care-in-the-u-s-v...
I'll bookmark it and read through it later, but from what I glanced at in the first half, it didn't get much better after that straw man. I especially like where it tried to say that government decisions are better because they're made on "evidence". Okay.
In the nonsense sense, yes. Your military spending subsidizes American defence contractors, who subsidize American politicians.
"Free" healthcare beats no healthcare. In 2007, 33 million Canadians had "free" healthcare. In 2007, 45.7 million Americans had no healthcare. It's nice to see Obamacare getting people coverage.
Rather than try to spin the story to make America look good, it would be more constructive to consider why America is declining and what it can do to reverse that trend.
In the software world, we're better at fixing bugs when we stop calling them undocumented features. That philosophy can work in the real world too.
As America becomes "enlightened" (heavy scare quotes) and withdraws its military umbrella, a strange world is left behind... how does Europe feel about having effectively no military with which to counter Russia's growing imperial ambitions? It's officially all smiles (or forced grins) while they're stuck depending on Russia now, but I'm sure wheels are spinning behind closed doors even now. If the US elects another President with ambitions to back off the foreign involvement even more, or if the situation deteriorates enough more on this one's watch, what are the odds that Europe has to start building up? And how many other places will have to follow?
And how will a social-benefit-addicted continent react to having to fund a military again? They certainly won't be able to maintain the current level of social commitments everywhere.
Maybe the US shouldn't be enforcing Pax Americana depending on your own personal values, but don't think for one second it hasn't had its benefits even outside of the US, and don't think that the end of Pax Americana is somehow going to occur with a burst of rainbows and puppies, where we go from one dominantly-powerful military to zero. The number can only go up.
That's a slight overstatement - the countries of the EU spend 38% of what the US spend on it's military - which given the arguable massive overspend of the US doesn't look completely unreasonable to me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_the_European_Union
Now of course what Europe doesn't have is strong unified leadership in these areas - which, given our history, is probably no bad thing although not the greatest thing to have at the moment.
Russia spends less that the UK and France combined on defense:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e...
[1]: Diplomacy is not chess, but it has chess-like elements (along with the poker-like elements). Trying to play diplomacy without the ability to threaten anything, even with no real intent or prospect of following through on the threat, leaves you with a proportionally much weaker portion.
Pray tell, is your threat model a revanchist, bankrupt Russia from the 90s making a daring lunge across Alaska? Canada's only credible threat is, well, America.
>In fact I've seen credible arguments that it has actually contributed to world peace significantly to have the US building up the way it has,
Within the context of the Cold War, and say, NATO buildup in post war central Europe this may or may not be true. It was certainly a boost to West German/French economies that didn't have to invest quite so heavily in fending off the Warsaw pact.
Outside of the European theatre, that's a significantly weaker argument given the proxy wars the US/USSR engaged in throughout the third world.
Citation needed.
I'm not sure how necessary it is to be that high, but I do know that there is a lot of waste in the military-industrial complex.
Given that the U.S. healthcare system ranks behind many countries with public healthcare and that the U.S. spends way more as a percent of GDP on healthcare than any other country it's quite reasonable to believe that taxpayer healthcare is as good as paid healthcare after taxes and is cheaper.