U.S. trails rest of world in health care

The Physicians Proposal, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is available at www.pnhp.org. It is a proposal put together by responsible physicians who advocate an expanded and improved version of traditional Medicare. According to the proposal, "the world's richest health-care system is unable to ensure basics like prenatal care and immunizations, and we trail the developed world on such indicators as infant mortality and life expectancy."

In life expectancy, we are 29th, right behind Bosnia. People largely misunderstand this statistic. They think that Americans may live a few years less than the rest of the developed world. That is not what this statistic represents, since once people in this country reach that magical age of 65, they are eligible for universal care, in the form of Medicare. What skews this statistic are the unnecessary deaths of Americans before 65. This is what causes the average life expectancy to drop.

Our country discovered much of the medical knowledge that the rest of the world enjoys. Why, then, are we exporting these discoveries and trailing the rest of the developed world?

Chris Doherty, a multiple sclerosis patient, lives in Bountiful.