Low Health Care Ranking Debunked

[Gus Van Horn blog]

By Gus Van Horn from Gus Van Horn,cross-posted by MetaBlog

John Stossel takes a look under the hood of the WHO study that Michael Moore and so many others make so much of when they push for socialized medicine, and finds, in his words, "less than meets the eye".

So what's wrong with the WHO and Commonwealth Fund studies? Let me count the ways.

The WHO judged a country's quality of health on life expectancy. But that's a lousy measure of a health-care system. Many things that cause premature death have nothing do with medical care. We have far more fatal transportation accidents than other countries. That's not a health-care problem.

Similarly, our homicide rate is 10 times higher than in the U.K., eight times higher than in France, and five times greater than in Canada.

When you adjust for these "fatal injury" rates, U.S. life expectancy is actually higher than in nearly every other industrialized nation.

Unsurprisingly, the study also skewed its results through a criterion it called "fairness", which basically gave points for government interference in the medical sector -- a category in which our nation should strive mightily for last place.

And Stossel's not done yet. He closes with this teaser: "Next week: the truth about the Commonwealth Fund study." Stay tuned.

-- CAV

http://ObjectivismOnline.com/archives/002766.html

[softwareNerd]

Linda Halderman has a post that addresses this issue as well: why healthcare is not the only factor that determines life-expectancy. (HT: We Stand FIRM)

[tito]

Points are deducted for not having a socialist system in the WHO report, I'll dig for where I read it now.

[softwareNerd]

A graph on a UC Santa Cruz site plots health-care spending against life-expectancy. There's no surprise. At first glance, spending more on health-care does appear to increase life-expectancy. Then, after a certain point it flattens: we observe higher spending, but not higher life-expectancy. As the articles linked above explain, life-expectancy has more factors than health-care. To get a good comparison, we would have to start with deaths from disease and "natural causes", and leave out homicides and auto-accidents.

There is a second aspect: not all health-care money is spent with a view to increasing life-expectancy. So, to do a comparison, we would have to remove a lot of items from health-care expenditure: e.g. viagara, braces and many other dental expenses. Even in a small thing like buying a drug: two drugs may have the same outcome in terms of health. However, the generic one might make the person sleepy, while the newer, expensive one might let them feel less like a zombie. Buying the expensive one leads to a "better life", but not a longer life.

Edited June 1, 2009 by softwareNerd

[UptonStellington]

Tito, the Stossel report mentions that.

Also, I thought this was pretty interesting: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-doctor-is...al-miscarriage/

[Clawg]

Here is another article which also compares individual states:

http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/...ate-part-1.html

[softwareNerd]

The "We Stand Firm" blog has some health-stats comparisons of U.S. and Europe.