This is getting tiresome. Do we need any more evidence that the U.S. has slipped below average and is now bringing up the rear in many categories among developed countries? This is the 2021 Mirror, Mirror report from The Commonwealth Fund, a non-profit generally considered to be competent and non-partisan.

The U.S. ranks last out of the 11 countries included. But the ranking understates the case, because the other countries are somewhat clustered in terms of cost and outcomes, and then the U.S. is a point far away from the cloud with much higher cost and much worse outcomes. It’s not an Anglo-American failure, because the UK, Australia, and New Zealand all do well. Canada is ranked second worst, but again it is on the lower right edge of the cloud and the U.S. is way out on its own.

I do think they picked a group of very high performing countries here. There have to be other developed countries, particularly in Asia, that could have been included. But somehow, I doubt including Japan, Taiwan, etc. would make the U.S. look any better.

I wonder though what would happen if they tried to compare just the over-65 U.S. population served by Medicare to the over-65 population in the other countries. If Medicare does much better than the U.S. health care “system” (i.e., cluster-you-know-what) as a whole, it would be an even stronger argument for Medicare for All. Should the U.S. maybe try to establish a health care system before the next pandemic arrives?