How many holes can he poke?
First let’s acknowledge that the U.S. medical system has serious problems. But the problems stem from departures from free-market principles. The system is riddled with tax manipulation, costly insurance mandates and bureaucratic interference. Most important, six out of seven health-care dollars are spent by third parties, which means that most consumers exercise no cost-consciousness. As Milton Friedman always pointed out, no one spends other people’s money as carefully as he spends his own.Even with all that, it strains credulity to hear that the U.S. ranks far from the top. Sick people come to the United States for treatment. When was the last time you heard of someone leaving this country to get medical care? The last famous case I can remember is Rock Hudson, who went to France in the 1980s to seek treatment for AIDS.
So what’s wrong with the WHO and Commonwealth Fund studies? Let me count the ways.
Related posts:
- Stossel in the WSJ
- Stossel gets it right, again
- Stossel on socialized medicine: We need Wisconsin to take the fall
- Stossel keeps on the pressure
- Government-run health care
- Why Americans fear radical health care reform
- Single-payer in Sweden: A cautionary tale
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{ 3 comments }
Medical tourism overseas is alive and well. The US has many fine medical institutions, but so does Canada, Europe, Asia, etc.
Pax,
MLO
A lot of the conclusions of these studies are meaningless, as they compare apples and oranges. The US “healthcare system” is primarily a procedure-based sick-care system that looks to diagnose illness and then improve the odds that someone sick may cope with/ recover from a particular ailment.
This has very little to do with public health and lifestyle factors that have the greatest impact on lifespan and population health in the era of antibiotics and vaccines for communicable diseases.
This is also different from “wellness” efforts that would serve to optimize health through diet/ exercise/ healthy habits. Nobody does this well today– even metrics like the RDA are to ensure minimum levels, not optimum functioning.
Lumping them all together simply goes too far beyond the realm of “medicine”.
From the FA:
“When you adjust for these “fatal injury” rates, U.S. life expectancy is actually higher than in nearly every other industrialized nation.”
If you just ignore all of that “death”, the US life expectancy rate is fairly high!
John Stossel has turned from a consumer reporter to a Libertarian ideologue. He concludes that all the problems with the US Healthcare system “stem from departures from free-market principles.”
To him, we need more “sink or swim” attitude and less of that anti-libertairian compassion stuff.
So, what facts does he use to asses where the US really does rank. Why none of course! Other than “it strains credulity to hear that the U.S. ranks far from the top”
As with so many, Stossel tries to knock down the WHO ranking but has nothing factual to replace it with. Come back when you do, Stossel.
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