Scotland is a  nation within a nation, whose population has remained around 5.1 million for the last 40 years.  So the fact that a study suggests  that 462,000 Scots have died as a result of poor care from the National Health Service over a 29 year period 1974 to 2003,  demanded that the ratio of unnecessary deaths to total population be translated to an American population model.

We are now a nation of 300 million and growing. At the current level, the US population is almost 59 times as large as Scotland's.  By that ratio, we would have had 27,087,000 unnecessary deaths over a 29 year period if we too had the "wisdom" to adopt such a system of universal health care  that does not provide "timely and effective treatment"  (the cause stated for most of the unnecessary deaths, many from strokes and heart attacks). 

That 29 year total is an average of 934,000 unnecessary deaths a year, or over 40% of the annual death toll in the US at the moment. Maybe the Democratic candidates for President, all of them calling for a federal model of some sort for universal health care (one that would inevitably require both rationing and price controls, like the British and Scottish model), can address these unnecessary deaths in one of the European health care utopias, and what makes them think they could do any better.