Your statement was:
">> If you have $$ you can have good health care in the US, if you don't...that's not the best health care in the world, it is one of the most iniquitous...the statistics bear that assertion."
As I said, there are no meaningful statistics on this subject; your post doesn't provide anything that would change that.
US health care is expensive because our form of government was never designed or intended to do this kind of thing. It is highly inefficient at it, and our political system cannot accommodate it. Our economy is based on free market principles, and as government has attempted to take over the system, it has disrupted the market mechanisms that control costs. Few people had trouble paying medical bills in 1964.
And there is the fact that we have (had) better health care than any other country, which obviously costs more.
While your link really didn't say much, most of the real studies done on the subject are essentially inconclusive because you cannot reach a meaningful comparison of these disparate systems.
For example, you cannot really take into account that the US, for the last 50 years, has been responsible for more than half of the entire world's medical innovation. That is difficult to quantify, and no major study I know of does it. As with any technology, being on the cutting edge is expensive. We are losing some of our edge today and perhaps that's a good thing; we can allow other countries to bear the cost of developing life-saving medications, equipment and techniques instead of us paying for a disproportionate amount. OTOH, there is no guarantee those things will be developed elsewhere because of more limited access to capital markets (although this has improved over the years in many places).
You cannot take into account that our capital markets are what enables this innovation. Important technologies can die on the vine in other countries because there is limited or no access to capital markets (depending on the country).
And it is very difficult to measure "health care" in a consistent way. Life expectancy provides a useful measure of health, but not health care. And it is practically impossible to adjust it for exogenous factors. But we do relatively well on the life expectancy comparison when the easy adjustments are made.
What none of these reports measures is the negative effect of government involvement in health care. The payment system is a disaster which creates disincentive, the waste fraud and abuse is out of control, and the most important single driver of wasted money is cost shifting created by government involvement. There ARE many studies on this subject.
Unless we get rid of Obamacare, this destruction of our health care system (and our economy along with it) will only get worse. That is abundantly clear. Hopefully, the economic damage will motivate Democrats toward repeal of the worst legislation in our nation's history. |
