Obviously if you include everywhere with bad data your numbers are wrong.

As for Mark Steyn, he has a long journalistic history of bad sources, so I have trouble accepting something he says. His numbers tend to be wrong.

Again, if Medicare is paying $1000 for a $3000 procedure the ratio of costs of administration to costs of treatment would go up! Basically, administrative costs are the non-procedure costs, if your total costs go down by reducing procedure costs the administrative costs would go up, so if they are paying far too little on procedures administrative costs should be a higher % but they are 3%. Your example basically proves my case.

The .2% vs .17% includes a lot of countries with pretty atrocious health care. I think a country that has the worlds largest economy and spends triple what anyone else does on healthcare should be doing far better than a .03% improvement! I'd be happy to take a look at your data if you provide a link.

Here are some other statistics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._by_death_rate ->
US 8.38 does worse than Canada's 7.74

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality_rate ->
Infant Mortality by state

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...mortality_rate ->
Infant Mortality by Country

Canada does much better than the US, the only state in the entire US with a number better than Canada's national average is Utah.