The physician data are just as subjective. If you’ve been following the health care reform debate, you will know that the docs are all over the place on this issue and are thus no more authoritative than the patients.

And “older”? 2004, 2005, and 2006—not so old after all.

I think the term I use in my post is “earlier.”

Economic data are taken from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development databases.

OECD data are not infallible. That organization often compares apples and oranges. A good discussion of that problem can be found here (see page 15).

This report—an update to two earlier editions—includes data from surveys of patients, as well as information from primary care physicians about their medical practices and views of their countries’ health systems. Compared with five other nations—Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom—the U.S. health care system ranks last or next to last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives. The U.S. is the only country in the study without universal health-care insurance coverage, partly accounting for its poor performance on access, equity, and health outcomes. The inclusion of physician survey data also shows U.S. lacking in adoption of information technology and use of nurses to improve care coordination for the chronically ill.

So the “subjective data” probably includes asking physicians, for example, if they use an electronic medical records system (yes/no) and the like.

Given that the same methods were used in all the countries, I still find the results pretty damning of the US health care system. But let the reader check out the study (the PDF file you link to) and its methodology and come to his/her own conclusions. To me, it seems like a serious study.