As with many of these "crisis" issues, most of the Conventional Wisdom balances like an inverted pyramid on a very small number of sources. Most of the criticism of America's health care system is from a WHO study that ranked health care of many nations, and put America far down the list (37th last time I looked). What most people didn't look at was the "grading" parameters, which ranked socialization of medicine much higher than actual delivery and quality of services. For example, the U.S. ranked #1 in responsiveness in that same WHO study. Ever read that in a newspaper?

The poor and elderly get damn good care in this country. Our government spends about $750 billion a year for health care in these two demographic categories, and that's just at the Federal level. That's about a fifth of the entire Federal budget, and more than the entire Defense budget.

This doesn't include state Medicaid spending, or health and human services spending in other categories.

It is, to put it as gently as possible, misleading to say that American health care is a disaster. This artifical crisis has been generated - like several others - to support a specific political goal.

Keep in mind too that it's a lot easier to deal with things like this when your entire continent has a population that is less than three times that of New York City alone.