Healthcare debate stuff

There is a chart on the internet that shows the life expectancy rankings of 224 nations. The people in favor of National Health Care are using this to show that the US is lagging behind nations that provide health care. I thought I would crunch the numbers and see if this is accurate. I originally posted this on the Hank III message board but I thought I would put it over here as well.

Ok here comes the actual research that I did all on my own. This is not a copy and paste job.

There are 36 countries in the world that have some form of public healthcare. This ranges from a full blown insurance program to a government prescription plan that provides your medications free of charge. If you take those 36 countries and look them up on the life expectancy list you will get a list that looks like this.

Japan 3
Australia 7
Canada 8
France 9
Sweden 10
Israel 13
Iceland 14
New Zealand 18
Italy 19
Spain 23
Greece 26
Austria 27
The Netherlands 30
Luxembourg 31
Germany 32
Belgium 33
United Kingdom 36
Finland 37
South Korea 40
Cyprus 45
Denmark 46
Ireland 47
Portugal 48
Costa Rica 54
Cuba 55
Chile 56
Argentina 66
Saudi Arabia 69
Sri Lanka 84
Oman 91
China 105
Brazil 121
Iraq 144
Ukraine 150
Russia 162
Afghanistan 214

Now if you take the average ranking of those countries you get 54.8 which is obviously lower than the US score of 50. In an effort to show the numbers a bit more fairly, I looked at what would happen if you throw out the highest number (214 for Afghanistan) and the lowest number (3 for Japan). This gives you an average score of 51.64. Still lower than the US ranking of 50.

One thing that I did find interesting in my research. Iraq and Afghanistan both have a national healthcare program paid for by the United States as part of the War Funding Package.