stands author dr howard stephen friedman sat down with r.t. i mean it was initiated by a conversation with my cousin when they were discussing the patient care and affordable care act patient patient protection and affordable care act and he had been defending the current system in america saying that it's the best in the world and i asked him how do you know that and his response was well i have no idea interestingly just a couple days afterwards i was doing some of my work at the united nations and i was looking at the human development report and it dawned on me that the data to compare the united states to other wealthy countries is readily available you can look at it you can see how we're doing and from there you can identify if we're doing better or worse and in the areas we're not doing as well one of the lessons we can learn from other countries so when you do the comparison what you find is overall the united states doesn't do that well on health safety democracy and equality we have some of the lowest rankings for education roughly