"The Worlds Best Healthcare?"
Prof. Boylan begins his 'lecture' with this pedantic flourish:
"Now, class, move your desks forward and listen up while I offer a short lecture on what you get for your healthcare dollar in the United States of America."
Good thinking Dan, everyone loves to be condescended to.
"First, you get “the finest healthcare system in the world.” For weeks, months, years and decades, you’ve heard our congressional ladies and gentlemen call it that - “the finest healthcare system in the world.”
They are demonstrating their gratitude. In the 2008 congressional elections, they collectively received $167 million in campaign contributions from healthcare industries.
Our congressional ladies and gentlemen also are demonstrating that they’re fast learners. In 2008, they listened to $484 million worth of lobbying by America’s healthcare industry - lobbying that invariably included the assertion that ours is the finest health-care system in the world.
Well professor, I've heard lots of people describe our healthcare system as the finest in the world, not just Congress folk. Are they all in cahoots with the healthcare industry as well? Funny, all I've heard from a majority of this Congress is how bad our healthcare system sucks. I don't take that as ungratefulness on their part, but rather delusion on yours.
Second, you get a health-care system that costs an enormous amount of money, much of which is spent on administration. According to Physicians for a National Health Program, “administration consumes at least 31 percent of healthcare spending” in the United States. How enormous are those costs? Administration of the the nation’s government-run Medicare system for old folks like me stands at 3 percent.
Put another way (in a 2007 Commonwealth Fund report), “U.S. health insurance costs as a share of total health spending are 30-70 percent higher than countries with mixed private/public insurance systems, and three times higher than in countries with the lowest rates.”
So when you pay your monthly healthcare premium - or the co-payment - remember all those lovely people you are helping to support who are neither doctors nor nurses nor anyone else who can fashion a splint for your broken leg or diagnose your ills."
From Cato.org
Advocates of socialized medicine, such as Physicians for a National Health Program, love to argue that America’s health care sector is less efficient than socialized systems because private insurers appear to have higher administrative costs. In yesterday’s New York Times, Tyler Cowen reveals the flaw in that logic:
The monitoring, marketing and overhead costs of private insurance are what allow more expensive medical treatments through the door. It is precisely because competing insurance companies spend money evaluating the appropriateness of claims that they are willing to pay for so many heart bypasses, extra tests, private hospital rooms and CT scans.
If European health care systems appear to have lower administrative costs, it is because, rather than scrutinizing claims, they limit the overall amount they will spend on medical services. Of course, that just means they shift costs to patients who either must pay for medical services themselves, or deal with the costs of waiting.
If the U.S. Medicare program appears to have lower administrative costs, it is because, rather than scrutinizing claims, Medicare just shovels money out the door. That merely shifts those costs onto taxpayers by driving up Medicare spending and taxes.
In Medicare Meets Mephistopheles, Cato adjunct David Hyman delights in the irony that medicine-socializers praise one of Medicare’s greatest failings (inadequate oversight of claims payment) as if it were a virtue.
Damn straight.
"Third, you get a healthcare system that is, indeed, No.1 - numero uno, ichiban, no ka oi - in three important categories: total healthcare expenditures per capita, total health expenditures as a share of gross domestic product, and rate of growth in total healthcare expenditures as a share of GDP over the past quarter century.
Aren’t you proud? We’re No. 1. Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom all trail us.
Let’s hear a loud, collegiate cheer: USA! USA! USA!
Half of the countries listed above spend less than half per capita on healthcare than the United States does. The rest spend about roughly 55 percent to 65 percent as much."
Not sure if comparative GDP expenditures elicits a fair comparison of who has the best healthcare system, (for instance, whoever spends the most money on a car usually has the best vehicle) but I find it fascinating that Mr. Boylan is obsessed almost exclusively on cost in this debate, as indeed most lefties are. I mean after all, don't lefties pride themselves on being the least materialist of the competing ideologies?
Be that as it may, there are many desirable factors to be considered which drive up US healthcare costs as compared to other countries, as per Wiki:
"revenues generated from these high healthcare costs have encouraged substantial investment: the United States is the leader in biotechnology, spending three times more per-capita in research and development than its nearest competitor, Europe.[7][8][9] In addition, the U.S. produces more new pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and affiliated biotechnology than any other country, or the Western European nations combined.[7][8][9][10]"
Nationalize healthcare and most of that goes away, socialism smothers innovation. Face it, you get what you pay for, in common parlance the chumps on the left are being penny wise and pound foolish.
"But our healthcare system leads in other categories as well. For example, we lead in the number of people who do not have healthcare coverage: 46 million and growing. By the reckoning of the Commonwealth Fund, we should be using the number 75 million - which represents the uninsured and the underinsured. Either way, we lead.
Those other countries don’t even compete. They provide healthcare coverage, usually “single-payer” (also called by many of our congressional ladies and gentlemen “socialized medicine") to all of their citizens."
Under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act everyone who is sick in America (whether they belong here or not) gets treated, not that I think they should be.
"And the list goes on. But I’ll mention just one more accomplishment we’ve achieved with our healthcare dollars. The United States can claim a higher infant mortality rate than all the countries I mentioned earlier: 6.26 deaths per 1,000 live births. Canada, with its system of socialized medicine, only has 5.04 per 1,000; France, yet another one of those countries that practices socialized medicine, just 3.33."
Wow, a double fallacy! A classic cum hoc ergo propter hoc and an appeal to emotion! Again, from Wiki:
While the United States reports every case of infant mortality, it has been suggested that some other developed countries do not. A 2006 article in U.S. News & World Report claims that "First, it's shaky ground to compare U.S. infant mortality with reports from other countries. The United States counts all births as live if they show any sign of life, regardless of prematurity or size. This includes what many other countries report as stillbirths. In Austria and Germany, fetal weight must be at least 500 grams (1 pound) to count as a live birth; in other parts of Europe, such as Switzerland, the fetus must be at least 30 centimeters (12 inches) long. In Belgium and France, births at less than 26 weeks of pregnancy are registered as lifeless.[5] And some countries don't reliably register babies who die within the first 24 hours of birth. Thus, the United States is sure to report higher infant mortality rates. For this very reason, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which collects the European numbers, warns of head-to-head comparisons by country."[6]
Professor Boylan concludes by asking:
"Aren’t you proud?"
Yes Dan, very!
"Class dismissed."
Now wait a minute professor! Amidst all your hand wringing about cost you never mentioned the uniquely American burden of litigiousness which also drives up healthcare, could that be because all your lefty pals are in the hind pocket of the ABA? Furthermore your suggestion that socialized healthcare will reduce administration is laughable. If anything it will bloat administration with an army of new bureaucrats, take Britain's NHS for example:
"The 1.4 million employees of the British National Health Service make the NHS the world's third-largest single employer, behind only the Chinese army and the Indian Railways. Yet the majority of those 1.4 million, Mr. Hannan said, are "managers," not medical personnel."
What about the Constitution? According to my understanding it was written to limit Federal power. Once you surrender your health care to the state you have given them carte blanche to dictate and delve into every aspect of your life (in the name of savings), and that after all is what this is all about, a cynical exercise in the aggregation of power and control by the left. If you truly think that healthcare should be a right, then do it the proper way and write a Constitutional Amendment, or if you want to do government-run health care that's perfectly Constitutional as it's written, do it at the state or local level; foolish but Constitutional. Multi-trillion dollar 'free' medicine simply cannot be a function of the Federal Govt. under our Constitution (as if anybody pays any attention to that dusty impedimenta anymore).
Oh yeah and one more thing, save the pedagoguery for the classroom Dan.
No comments:
Post a Comment