America has long deluded itself about its virtues and honesty.
Inflation is just one very small example.

Here are three others.

Medical people claim that Medicare reimbursements for doctors and
hospitals are too low and need to be raised, but in point of fact
- and I can prove it - Medicare rates are higher than Blue Cross
PPO rates. Doctors and hospitals may complain about Blue Cross
but the big public squawk is about Medicare. Why? Simple, the
insurance companies spend lots of money on advertising and give
doctors and hospitals perks to silence them. Medicare doesn't
have a dedicated structure that defends itself. After all, when
your costs of administrative overhead are 3% you don't have the
same slack as when they are 30%, the current figure for insurance
companies.

The other bit of delusional thinking is that providing Universal
Health Care for all of us is going to be too expensive and we
just can't afford it. I was shown an example of the real costs
yesterday by a roofer. He was telling me about how some roofing
contractors will pick up a crew at Home Depot for $10-12 per hour
and they get no benefits, especially medical. So where do these
people go when the get sick? The hospital emergency room where it
costs upwards of $750 to treat them instead of a doctor's office
or a clinic where it might cost $75 or so. It doesn't take many
of these emergency room visits that don't get paid for directly
by the patient or anyone else to far outweigh the costs of
medical coverage through Medicare or a similar system. Penny wise
and pound foolish.

The third example of sloppy and delusional thinking is how
"efficient" our "free enterprise system" is. If it was truly that
good then we would have a lower cost of medical care and better
outcomes than those "socialist" systems like Canada, France,
Germany, Cuba..., but we don't. We pay a minimum of about 90%
MORE than they do and yet have shorter life spans, infant
mortality and a bunch of other metrics.

In fact among industrialized countries we rank #17. This is from
several years ago. The recent WHO ranking puts us at 37th
although there is some question about the methodology being fair.
According to some people, when you factor in the facts that we
have a higher rate of fatal transportation accidents than other
countries and our homicide rate is totally out of whack, the
claim is that we would actually have a longer life span than
almost all other industrialized countries. However, this
objection fails to deal with such things as infant mortality rate
which would not be greatly impacted by murder of auto accidents.
The exact reality is not clear. What is clear is we can not crow
about the efficiency of capitalism in delivering meaningful
health care.

"The US has a high infant mortality rate, ranking last among 23
nations. We rank near the bottom in healthy life expectancy at
age 60, and 15th among 19 countries in deaths from a wide range
of illnesses that would not have been fatal if treated with
timely and effective care. The good news is that we have done a
better job than other industrialized nations in reducing
smoking." Source:
http://www.nutramed.com/medicalcare/medicalcare_usa_canada.htm

In the Commonwealth Fund study of six countries the US was first
in only one area in this very limited scope study, the
application of the right care. In all other areas we were dead
last or next to dead last. Overall the US was last and Canada
second to last.

http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Content/Publications/Fund-Reports/200...

There is an interesting tidbit in all this that would not be easy
to spot unless you crosschecked with other data: The US has the
highest percentage of private funding, ~70% and Canada second
with ~30% followed by others that I saw of about 15% or lower. I
didn't check all of them so this might be somewhat in error.

"The US should be particularly concerned about these findings,"
says Gerard Anderson, director of the Bloomberg School of Public
Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "If I'm spending
twice as much, I'd expect to have the better outcomes."

(http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0505/p02s01-uspo.html)

Money flows can be seen in the right panel of:

http://www.ecosante.org/index2.php?base=OCDE&langh=ENG&langs=ENG&sess...

BTW, on the whole Americans tend to sneer at the French, and some
of it is, perhaps, justifiable but it is interesting to note that
some of the best data on health care and such is often connected
to the French. And then there is Doctors Without Boarders, or
Médecins Sans Frontières.

Oh, well. America shall triumph over the frogs in the end. We'll
eat their legs. ;->

Best,

Allen