Theodore Dalrymple, a British physican and noted essayist, compares the health care of a human and a dog in Britain and concludes the dog has it better.
The one kind of reform that America should avoid is one that is imposed uniformly upon the whole country, with a vast central bureaucracy. No nation in the world is more fortunate than America in its suitability for testing various possible solutions. The federal government should concern itself very little in health care arrangements, and leave it almost entirely to the states. I don't want to provoke a new war of secession but surely this is a matter of states' rights. All judgment, said Doctor Johnson, is comparative; and while comparisons of systems as complex as those of health care are never definitive or indisputable, it is possible to make reasonable global judgments: that the French system is better than the British or Dutch, for example. Only dictators insist they know all the answers in advance of experience. Let 100--or, in the case of the U.S., 50--flowers bloom.
The reasoning that led to these conclusions by Dr. Dalrymple can be found here.
