UCLA expert blames American values for health care crisis

"To heal our ailing health care system, we need to stop thinking like Americans." That is the message of two articles by the University of California at Los Angeles, USA's Marc Nuwer, an expert on national health care reform, published in Neurology, the journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

"Americans prize individual choice and resist limiting care," says Dr Nuwer, a professor of clinical neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "We believe that if doctors can treat very ill patients aggressively and keep every moment of people in the last stages of life under medical care, then they should. We choose to hold these values. Consequently, we choose to have a more expensive system than Europe or Canada," he said.

Consider these statistics: