Uh, no. Health care is a lot more than keeping people alive.

Cost: More expensive than the European average, quite a bit cheaper than the US.

Life expectancy: second in the world, at 81.81.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...

EDIT: And, since it apparently wasn't clear from context, by "best of both worlds", I mean that it manages to get a competitive, consumer oriented system without sacrificing universal coverage and regulation of quality.

Adopt the phrase "patient oriented system" and I'm totally on board.

It may correlate reasonably well, but there are plenty of ways life expectancy can be the same for systems with very different level of "wellness". For a long time, Sweden had special wards for people in persistent vegetative states because there was no provision for ending care, for example, resulting in people being kept alive for years long than they otherwise would. I believe they loosened the requirements for ending care quite a while ago. But there are plenty of other ways that life expectancy can correlate badly with "wellness", e.g. poor treatment of patents with long term conditions such as dementia where patients can often easily survive for a decade or more but where quality of life can be massively different depending on treatment.

I've spent much time in critical care, as both a patient and an advocate.

Quality of life is of utmost importance. I support DNRs, euthanasia, and so forth.

But I would not presume to impose my values on anyone else.

In the free market you could argue that 'customer satisfaction' is the only measure of effectiveness you need to consider. Equating customer satisfaction with best solution fails in everything from automobile ratings to elections.

For example if you increase the tax on cigarettes you increase life expectancy.

And if you increase immigration, and therefore decrease the average age of your population, you will decrease per capita costs.

>Per capita costs and life expectancy.

This is laughably wrong. The biggest influence on life expectancy isn't the medical system at all - it's the lifestyle habits of the populace. Genetics play a big role as well.