The WHO's rankings are Bullshit. The U.S. does NOT rank 37th in the world.

The Who rankings are Bullshit. The U.S. does NOT rank 37th in the world.
I'm tired of people using this meaningless statistic to argue for health care reform. While I agree the U.S. is in desperate need of health care reform that has absolutely nothing to do with the validity of this ranking system.

Factors for measuring the quality of health care
The WHO health care rankings result from an index of health-related statistics. As with any index, it is important to consider how it was constructed, as the construction affects the results. WHO’s index is based on five factors, weighted as follows:3
1 Health Level: 25 percent
2 Health Distribution: 25 percent
3 Responsiveness: 12.5 percent
4 Responsiveness Distribution: 12.5 percent
5 Financial Fairness: 25 percent
The first and third factors have reasonably good justifications for inclusion in the index.

Health level
This factor can most justifiably be included because it is measured by a country’s disability-adjusted life expectancy (DALE). Of course, life expectancy can be affected by a wide variety of factors other than the health care system, such as poverty, geography, homicide rate, typical diet, tobacco use, and so on. Still, DALE is at least a direct measure of the health of a country’s residents, so its inclusion makes sense.

Responsiveness
This factor measures a variety of health care system features, including speed of service, protection of privacy, choice of doctors, and quality of amenities (e.g., clean hospital bed linens). Although those features may not directly contribute to longer life expectancy, people do consider them aspects of the quality of health care services, so there is a strong case for including them.
The other three factors, however, are problematic.

Financial fairness
A health system’s financial fairness (FF) is measured by determining a household’s contribution to health expenditure as a percentage of household income (beyond subsistence), then looking at the dispersion of this percentage over all households. The wider the dispersion in the percentage of household income spent on health care, the worse a nation will perform on the FF factor and the overall index (other things being equal).
In the aggregate, poor people spend a larger percentage of income on health care than do the rich. Insofar as health care is regarded as a necessity, people can be expected to spend a decreasing fraction of their income on health care as their income increases. The same would be true of food, except that the rich tend to buy higher quality food.
The FF factor is not an objective measure of health attainment, but rather reflects a value judgment that rich people should pay more for health care, even if they consume the same amount. This is a value judgment not applied to most other goods, even those regarded as necessities such as food and housing. Most people understand and accept that the poor will tend to spend a larger percentage of their income on these items.
More importantly, the FF factor, which accounts for a quarter of each nation’s OA score, necessarily makes countries that rely on market incentives look inferior. The FF measure rewards nations that finance health care according to ability to pay, rather than according to actual consumption or willingness to pay. In most countries, a household’s tax burden is proportional to income, or progressive (i.e., taxes consume an increasing share of income as income rises). Thus, a nation’s FF score rises when the government shoulders more of the health spending burden, because more of the nation’s medical expenditures are financed according to ability to pay. In the extreme, if the government pays for all health care, then the distribution of the health spending burden is exactly the same as the distribution of the tax burden. To use the existing WHO rankings to justify more government involvement in health care – such as via a singlepayer health care system – is therefore to engage in circular reasoning