NORTHRIDGE, Calif.

BARACK OBAMA and many in the Democratic Party look to Europe for inspiration for reforming America’s healthcare. Back in 2003, Mr. Obama said, “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health-care program,” thereby endorsing the state-controlled health systems of countries such as Norway and Britain — and endorsing ideology over quality.

According to the World Health Organization, Mr. Obama was correct: In its highly influential World Health Report, America scores well below the vast majority of Western European countries — and even below the likes of Morocco and Costa Rica in one index. This report is frequently cited by Democratic reformers wanting to replace the U.S. market system with something a little more Continental. But an examination of the two indices in the WHO report tells us more about the ideology of the authors than the quality of American health care.

Michael Moore made great sport in his movie Sicko of pointing out that the WHO ranked the United States a lowly 37th in the world, considerably below top-10 France and Canada (although the United States is 15th in the other index). But, much like Mr. Moore himself, the rankings are far from impartial.

The most obvious bias is that 62.5 percent of their weighting concerns not quality of service but equality. In other words, the rankings are less concerned with the ability of a health system to make sick people better than with the political consideration of achieving equal access and state-controlled funding.

One of the five factors in the calculations is “Financial Fairness.” This favors systems that charge richer people a higher rate of health tax, irrespective of how much, or little, health service they use. Colombia comes out on top. This measure has nothing to do with the quality of health care, yet it counts for a quarter of the weighting.

The WHO claims that its rankings are a tool for comparing different means of financing health-care systems, yet this tool inherently favors taxpayer-funded systems and gives the rankings a bias that renders comparison pointless. As a result of this bias, the United States languishes in lowly 54th place on “Financial Fairness,” largely explaining its poor overall position.

The rankings include measures for “health level” and “responsiveness.” “Health level” is their way of saying life expectancy, while “responsiveness” refers to a survey based on “respect for persons” and elements such as speed of service, convenience and choice — yet even in these cases half the overall weighting is determined by considerations of equality. Thus, a country with a poor level of “responsiveness” throughout the population will score higher than a country with a good level in some parts and an excellent level in others.

The “health level” reliance on life expectancy is also dubious, as it is influenced by factors unrelated to health care, such as tobacco consumption, diet and so on. That some Americans are obese and smoke surely affects their health but has little to do with the health-care system per se — yet these factors again drag the U.S. down in the ranking.

Americans generally believe that whatever the other problems with the U.S. health-care system, its standards of care are high. In the details of the rankings there is evidence to support this: The “responsiveness” measurement, without the equality weighting, shows the United States as number one in the world — but this performance measure only makes up one-eighth of the ranking, dwarfed by the measures of equality and state funding.

Also left off are typical measures of health-care standards such as disease-specific five-year survival rates. With these, U.S. health care comes off somewhat better. In 2007, British medical journal The Lancet published research showing the United States to be the best in the world for cancer-survival rates, with Britain’s state-controlled “single-payer” National Health Service disturbingly far behind. It showed that a man under the United Kingdom’s tottering 60-year-old NHS has an 18 percent lower chance of surviving cancer than a man under the U.S. system.

Of course, this does not mean the U.S. health system is perfect. There is near-consensus on the need to address increasing costs, waste and the fact that too many Americans still lack insurance. But decision-makers and voters must beware ideological arguments and rankings that falsely depict idyllic socialist health systems. They do not exist.

Glen Whitman is an associate professor of economics at California State University.