[Gertie Keddle]

Health care wasn't broken
Christopher J. Conover | Los Angeles Times
Posted at AEI
March 15, 2012
Excerpt:


The epic debate over President Obama's controversial individual health insurance mandate finally reaches the Supreme Court this month. Stripped of legal jargon, the administration's defense of the mandate — and the broader Affordable Care Act — boils down to this: The U.S. healthcare system was badly broken, so we had to fix it.

Indeed, the fierce battle over reform was based on the perception that Americans did not get good value for their money. Many of the global comparisons that informed this view, however, were flawed, incomplete or misleading. It's time to set the record straight.

The U.S. spends too much compared to other countries.

This is a pervasive misconception encouraged by reformers who sought to argue that other countries, especially those with single-payer systems such as Canada or Britain, outperform the United States.

<snip>

Conventional models purportedly show that the U.S. spends 60% more on healthcare than it should given its level of per capita income. These models treat all nations the same so that the United States and its 300 million people is compared with very small countries such as Iceland, population 500,000. But a more precise model that compares apples to apples shows that the U.S. spends only 1.5% more than it should. By contrast, France spends about one-fifth too much, while Canada and Britain spend about one-fifth too little.


Other countries are doing better at controlling health spending growth.

<snip>

What really matters is how much the average person has to spend on everything else once healthcare has been purchased. And on this score, Americans have a huge advantage. In real dollar terms, the U.S. margin of advantage in nonhealth spending increased between 1960 and 2007 compared with every country in the then-G7 except Japan. The U.S. spends more on healthcare in large part because it can afford to do so.

The U.S. has abysmal infant mortality rates.

This is a half-truth. The U.S. ranks 43rd internationally in infant mortality, according to United Nations figures for the years 2005 to 2010. Unfortunately, there is no consistent standard for reporting infant deaths across countries.

<snip>

Specifically, many nations also do not report any live births at less than 23 weeks, even when vital signs are present, according to a study published in 2000 in the American Journal of Public Health. That same study found that when all deaths to infants delivered in Philadelphia at 22 weeks' gestation were excluded, the city's measured infant mortality rate declined by 40%.

If we categorize births by length of gestation, the U.S. ranks second, third or fourth among major European countries in achieving the lowest infant mortality rates for every category examined prior to full term.


The U.S. has abysmal average life expectancy.

Life expectancy does not suffer from the same measurement problems that distort infant mortality comparisons. Even so, the U.S. ranking of 39th in life expectancy (according to U.N. figures) also is thoroughly misleading. When life expectancy figures are adjusted to account for deaths due to violence, the United States ranks No. 1 among nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. U.S. deaths due to violence include all gunshot-related deaths as well as deaths due to automobile accidents or other injuries. Such deaths, obviously, say nothing about the quality of U.S. medical care.

<snip>

There are many problems with the U.S. health system. But figuring out how to fix them requires a clear understanding of where we fall short. Too often, Americans appear to think that other countries, such as Canada, Britain or France, offer a "magic bullet" healthcare system that would cure our ills.

Article

This post has been edited by Gertie Keddle: 17 March 2012 - 07:54 AM

[horseman]

Liberals have been bleating those fraudulent infant mortality and life expectancy rates for years.

I'll tell you something else about healthcare in this country. People are idiots. My wife was taking a friend shopping. Her adult daughter has a multitude of health problems(bi-polar, etc..etc) and her insurance covers 6 prescriptions a month. The daughter just contracted a sinus infection but could not fill the script for antibiotics because it would be the 7th of the month and she would have to pay 40 bucks out of pocket. My wife had them call her doctor and switch the script to another antibiotic that was available under the pharmacy's 1 dollar prescription program.

[natural_selection]

I don't believe that our health care system is broken, just poorly designed. It's missing a key element that has been proven to keep costs down in just about every other aspect of our economy. That element is competition.

When a consumer decides which product or service to purchase, cost is a major factor in their decision.

When a business decides which product or service to purchase, cost is a major factor in their decision.

When providing a product or service to a consumer or business, the provider must keep their price competitive with others in their field or they risk losing sales. In our current health care system, health care providers don't need to compete with price. Patients don't care about the doctors fee if insurance is paying for it. Insurance companies don't choose the cheapest doctors, they just advertise the price they're willing to pay for services and anybody willing to do it for that price is included in the network.

There is no incentive for doctors to charge less than what the insurance companies are willing to pay. That's where the lack of competition is and that's why prices are out of control.

Taking the time to design a health care system with competitive pricing pressure on health care providers would be much more effective than raising our taxes to pay for overpriced health care.

[Adam Smithee]

Gertie Keddle, on 17 March 2012 - 07:53 AM, said:

The epic debate over President Obama's controversial individual health insurance mandate finally reaches the Supreme Court this month. Stripped of legal jargon, the administration's defense of the mandate — and the broader Affordable Care Act — boils down to this: The U.S. healthcare system was badly broken, so we had to fix it.

Indeed, the fierce battle over reform was based on the perception that Americans did not get good value for their money. Many of the global comparisons that informed this view, however, were flawed, incomplete or misleading. It's time to set the record straight.

Yes, it was broken. It was broken because there was ALREADY too much government interference in healthcare and insurance, and way too many mandates.

Part of the brokenness was in the fact that they were making 'global' comparisons in the first place. Frankly, I don't give a flying fig how anyone else does it. We're not England. W're not Sveden. We're not Germany. WE ARE AMERICA. We do things OUR way. And anyone who has a problem with that ought to be frog-marched to the nearest border and given a swift kick in the ass to get them across it.

[scotsman]

Quote

Part of the brokenness was in the fact that they were making 'global' comparisons in the first place. Frankly, I don't give a flying fig how anyone else does it. We're not England. W're not Sveden. We're not Germany. WE ARE AMERICA. We do things OUR way. And anyone who has a problem with that ought to be frog-marched to the nearest border and given a swift kick in the ass to get them across it

Doing it your way and learning from other countries are not mutually exclusive though.

[Adam Smithee]

scotsman, on 17 March 2012 - 12:09 PM, said:

Doing it your way and learning from other countries are not mutually exclusive though.

Yes, sure, but ONLY up to a point. We can learn from others without becoming others. And part of learning from others is recognizing the mistakes that others make and not repeating those mistakes ourselves.

This is where the liberals have gone wrong (And not just on healthcare but on many things). The mantra from the left during the healthcare debate was "We're the only industrialized nation that doesn't [fill in the blank]" with the automatic presumption that if others are doing it then there must be something wrong with us for not doing it. That's BS.