David Leonhardt has an excellent piece...

...in the Times today about the current state of health care in America, "Health Care's Uneven Road To a New Era." He says that (my emphasis):

The health care overhaul that passed Congress is far from ideal ... but it does represent progress.
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... When you dig ... you often discover ... the real problem [is] the status quo.

American families spend almost twice as much on health care — through premiums, paycheck deductions and out-of-pocket expenses — as families in any other country. In exchange, we receive top-notch specialty care in many areas. Yet on the whole, we do not get much better care than countries that spend far less.

We don’t live as long as people in Canada, Japan, most of Western Europe or even relatively poor Jordan. Misdiagnosis is common. Medical errors occur more often than in some other countries. Unique to the developed world, millions of people have no health insurance, and millions more, like many fast-food workers, are underinsured.
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This is where health reform comes in. It tried to solve the problem by creating what policy experts call a three-legged stool.

First, people will be required to buy insurance, to spread costs among the sick and the healthy. Second, insurers will be prohibited from cherry-picking only the healthiest customers, again to spread costs. Finally, the government will give subsidies to people, like McDonald’s workers, who can’t afford insurance on their own.

Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland all use a system along these lines to cover everyone, largely through the private sector, for less money per person than this country spends.