KEY POINTS:
Forget the health headlines, many New Zealanders are quite comfortable with our health system and think it only needs minor changes.
A poll of residents in ten industrialised countries has found that Americans are most pessimistic about their system, with a third saying it needs to be completely rebuilt.
In contrast, New Zealanders generally say the system is working quite well but needs a few tweaks.
The poll of 1000 people in each of the ten countries was carried out by Harris Interactive.
Ten surveys were conducted, each polling around 1,000 people, in Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and the United States.
The New Zealand findings indicate:
* 26 per cent of New Zealanders think the health care system works well but needs only minor changes, putting us on a par with Canada. Our health system ranks third most popular behind the Dutch and French systems but ahead of Australia, Spain, Britain, Germany, the US and Italy.
* 17 per cent of New Zealanders think the system needs to be completely rebuilt, compared to 33 per cent of Americans on their system and nine per cent of Dutch.
The Harris Interactive poll, carried out by telephone polling in New Zealand, came to two conclusions:
* Health systems always appear to be in crisis no matter how popular they are
* Goverments are always either changing the system or debating how to change them.
Thirty-three per cent of Americans said the US system "has so much wrong with it that we need to completely rebuild it," while a further 50 per cent said "fundamental changes are needed to make it work better."
At the other end of the scale, the Dutch healthcare system fared best, with only nine per cent saying it needed a complete revamping, a separate poll showed.
France led the way among people who think their healthcare system is the envy of the world, with 70 per cent of the French thinking along those lines.
Nearly seven in 10 Britons think the National Health Service is "crucial to British society and we must do everything to maintain it."
- NZ Herald staff, Agencies
