The Hoover Institute has a great posting outlining the ten reasons that America’s healthcare system in in better condition than you might suppose put together by Scott W. Atlas.
Did you know cancer survival rates are better in the USA? How about that Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases? Did you know lower income Americans are healthier than those in the same economic strata in Canada? Atlas has these and more.
Medical care in the United States is derided as miserable compared to health care systems in the rest of the developed world. Economists, government officials, insurers, and academics beat the drum for a far larger government role in health care. Much of the public assumes that their arguments are sound because the calls for change are so ubiquitous and the topic so complex. Before we turn to government as the solution, however, we should consider some unheralded facts about America’s health care system.
Go on over to the Hoover Institute and check this revealing piece out, will you?
Tags: Hoover Institute
I think you should take the time to look at the references for the 10 points.
Personally, I found something seemed a bit amiss in the list. The writer never compares the US to any international average, but alwaus to a shifting single country, Canada, Germany, UK…
And lots of the points were about cancer, as if the writer could not find 10 different points but had to reuse the same one over and over.
Any system can look good if you get to pick ten single points and compare each to one to a country of your choice. That doesn’t mean its good, it just means you can find ten points where its not dead last.
So I looked up the references. Surprise.
Most are not actual research, but papers produced by rightwing think tanks. The ones that I looked up that are actual research -concluded exactly the opposite of what the author claimed!
Here is something from the comments to the survey referenced as support for point 7 (The study itself found that people in the US were far more dissatisfied with their system than any other nation, and the greater goverment control systems were less dissatisfied)
“Comparing the U.S. health-care system to other industrialized countries is not for the faint of heart. The deficiencies in the U.S. system are painfully evident in every such study, and this one is no exception,” said Dr. David Katz, director of Yale University School of Medicine’s Prevention Research Center. “We manage to spend more on less efficient health care than any country in the world.”
That is not something I picked out from the net at random -that is what the survey the author uses to support his point resulted in.