Health Care In The U.S.

***UPDATE: Heading Right has a perfect example of this...the USA has a better cancer survival rate than all of Europe (which is primarily socialized/universal health care).



The New York Times recently declared that the U.S. lagged behind in health care around the world, citing a World Health Organization study from 2000 and a Commonwealth Fund study from last May. John Stossel on RealClearPolitics.com shows how they got it wrong.

The WHO ranked the U.S. 37th, and the Commonwealth Fund ranked the U.S. last behind Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom in all but one category.

Stossel concedes that there are definitely problems in our health care system, but argues that those weaknesses are because we're heading toward socialized medicine. Six out of seven health care dollars spent here are spent by 3rd parties, and it's not hard to figure out that no one spends other people's money as carefully as their own. Even so, Stossel points out that people from all over the world come to the U.S. for medical care, not the other way around.

There are a number of reasons these studies are flawed. The WHO study focused on life expectancy, but the U.S. has far more fatal traffic accidents than most other countries, as well as higher homicide rates. Adjusting our life expectancy for those facts alone gives us one of the highest life expectancies in the world. We also have more premature deaths from poorer diet and excercise habits than many other countries, and those effect life expectancy, too.

Our rankings are also adversely affected by the 45 million uninsured Americans, but that number is misleading, too. A full 37% of that number are people in households making more than $50,000, and almost 20% are in households making $75,000. Twenty percent are not citizens at all, and 33% are eligible for existing government programs but not enrolled. People who choose not to obtain insurance coverage for personal reasons or who are not covered because they are not supposed to be in America at all should not be a knock on our system.

Here's the key point: we are less socialistic than other countries. The WHO study looked not just at the absolute quality of health care, but also on how fairly health care of any quality was distributed.

Even with the problems in our health care system, the U.S. is the world leader in quality care and innovation. We only "falter" when the ranking criteria are focused on socialized medicine.

How many of you, when finding out that you need some kind of advanced medical procedure, automatically think about making arrangements to travel outside the country? Yeah, that's what I thought; me, neither.

There's my two cents.