America's health-care system is ailing, imperfect

The myth about the American health-care system needs to be settled once and for all. It is not the best. Period. Exclamation point!

I wish it were, but U.S. health care is not the best in the world. We need to wash this fallacy out of our heads and eliminate it from our lexicon. Whoever repeats this statement is either highly benefited by the power or profit of the status quo, or they are ignorant of reality and are simply mouthing a phrase that goes along with other nationalistic platitudes that we chant as if we were sophomores at a high school football game.

The rest of us who pay the $2 trillion annual price tag with huge premium payments, or who have been denied insurance coverage due to incidental asymptomatic nasal polyps in spite of no health issues since a tonsillectomy at 4 years of age, or who have petitioned for bankruptcy protection due to medical costs, or who can't change jobs for fear of losing coverage for a family member with cancer, or who have lost their employment in this economic downturn and immediately have no health insurance do not agree.

Tell those people and the primary-care doctors who know them as people and not as some skin rash that this is the best system in the world and see how they answer.

When the misinformed brag about the health-care system they often tout some wonder drug or some expensive piece of equipment.

They may point to a richly adorned hospital lobby or some medical miracle. One frequently mentioned is the care of premature infants and the million-dollar babies. There are now survivors who were born at 23 weeks of gestation. That is younger than the age of someone who could be legally aborted by the rules of Roe v. Wade. Seeing these children in my office is a miracle for sure, especially after having cared for much older preemies with less success only a couple of decades ago. But what is forgotten in that marvelous display of technology is the magnificent disappointment in the prevention of prematurity among the unwed and teenage mothers. Three cheers for bigger machines. Six Bronx cheers for better health.