Government control freaks will stop at nothing to advocate more socialized health care for the United States. If one looks beyond the smoke & mirrors of the World Health Organization rankings, a true picture appears.
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.
Here’s what is wrong with their study.
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.
Diet and lack of exercise also bring down average life expectancy.
This is my favorite part, it shows a clear bias towards more costly and inferior socialized health care.
Another reason the U.S. didn’t score high in the WHO rankings is that we are less socialistic than other nations. What has that got to do with the quality of health care? For the authors of the study, it’s crucial. The WHO judged countries not on the absolute quality of health care, but on how “fairly” health care of any quality is “distributed.” The problem here is obvious. By that criterion, a country with high-quality care overall but “unequal distribution” would rank below a country with lower quality care but equal distribution.
It’s when this so-called “fairness,” a highly subjective standard, is factored in that the U.S. scores go south.
Fairness, while sounding like a noble goal is really a prescription for equal, inferior and more costly health care. Without competition and direct cost accountability, innovation will suffer and costs to consumers will increase. Socialized medicine is equivalent to having price controls and price controls always lead to a supply shortage. One only has to look at the wait times in countries with socialized medicine to realize the serious deficiencies in that type of system.
12% of the people in Ontario can’t find a primary care physician. The average for all of Canada is 10%. The average wait time in Canada for routine procedures is 17 weeks, much longer if there is a chance you might die without some quick medical intervention.
The government, with its ability to raise taxes, drives up costs. The government will also practice cost control when necessary by deciding who merits life saving procedures based on the probability of success. Those kind of decision belong in the hands of the physician and the patient, not some bureaucrat worried about balancing a budget.
As Ronald Reagan once said, “The government that provides you with everything, also has the power to take it all away!”
Read it all::Why the U.S. Ranks Low on WHO’s Health-Care Study::By John Stossel
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