Don’t know if reporting about the findings of The Commonwealth Fund’s latest survey can be construed as newsworthy. Waking up everyday to the same alarm, the same radio station, and proceeding methodically through the same morning rarely elicits news coverage or “film at 11.”

The survey released today compared healthcare situations among 11 First-world countries. Suffice to say, America remains inert. The same old, same old: healthcare in the US, despite recent strides in EHR technology spurred by the HITECH Act of ARRA, has yet to register much of an uptick in respondents perceptions. For the US citizen healthcare is a matter of costs and time – both expanding, and confidence – wallowing or declining.

Sometimes you have to wonder if some figurative meteor is the only thing that will lay low the Paleolithic beast that our healthcare system has become. Even with technological innovation, evolution of the system doesn’t seem to be modifying anyone’s behavior. Perhaps, the inert, broken system evinces a corollary of Darwin’s Origin of the Species: Survival of the biggest.

And can we still abide by what seems to be the prevailing wisdom about our healthcare system: “IF it’s broke, leave it alone?” The numbers in the survey sadly are not too surprising. Hopefully, awareness leads to improvement.

Find the survey here. Check out the chartpack which details more data in pdf than the given summary/abstract on the website.

Then respond below – Is the US healthcare system too far gone to ever really fix?