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Despite all the debate about health care, Americans tend to assume they are in the best of hands when they enter the hospital. This is inaccurate: American health care is in the bottom half of all industrialized countries. This is only the largest in a broad set of misperceptions. We appropriately worry about the security of technology, but fail to see how its absence kills hundreds of people every day from medical errors. We over-value the impact of intervention on saving lives and ignore the 200,000 people who die each year unnecessarily from diseases they did not have to get. We worry that end of life discussions and palliative care will lead to ''death squads,'' when research proves that people actually live not only better, but also longer. We demand modern information technology from our banks, airlines, retailers and hotels, but we passively accept last century's technology in our health care.