The U.S. is an outlier.

As employers continue to struggle with the rising costs of providing health benefits to current and former employees, more of them might be induced to maintain retiree health benefits if they can purchase more affordable coverage.

These patients are the canary in the coal mine of any health care system.

What's striking is that we are clearly a world leader in how much we spend on health care. We should be expecting to be the best. Clearly, we should be doing better.

Driven up by relatively high medication and lab or test errors, at 34 percent, the spread between the United States and the countries with the lowest error rates was wide.

The U.S. is unique among advanced industrialized nations for failure to provide basic universal coverage to insure access and remove the fear of financial consequences in bills when ill.