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Politics : Libertarian Discussion Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Doren who wrote (7577)	3/12/2009 11:50:39 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13062

That's a pretty silly study. It compares statistics on life expectancy, death rates and even cholesterol readings and blood pressures. Life expectancy and death rates are affected by many things besides the health care insurance system (or even the whole health care system, which is not the same thing). Two of those things are cholesterol reandings and blood pressures. Those have more to do with diet than with health insurance, and are reasons why we would have lower life expectancy, possible even if our health care and health insurance. They are counting these factors backwards.

To: Doren who wrote (7577)	3/12/2009 3:51:27 PM
From: longnshort	2 Recommendations Respond to of 13062

A couple of years ago, Sen. Hillary Clinton made a similar comment in a New York Times op-ed: 'If we spend so much (on health care), even after administrative costs, why does the United States rank behind 47 other countries in life expectancy and 42nd in infant mortality?' Never mind that their numbers don't agree. Their point is the same: The U.S. leads the world in spending on health care, but trails dozens of other countries in basic health outcomes. It's an argument health care reformers make ad nauseam. But is it true? Does the U.S. really rank behind Italy, Greece, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Malta in terms of infant mortality? Are we really wasting so much health care money that we rank behind Bosnia, Jordan, Israel and Guam in terms of life expectancy? The short answer is no. While politicians love to cite these international comparisons, they are rife with problems that end up making the U.S. look worse, a fact pointed out by researchers for years. Take infant mortality. The international statistics that Hillary, Ted and others love to cite come from the World Health Organization (WHO), which defines a life birth as any baby showing any signs of life. While the U.S. carefully follows this definition, many other countries do not. As the WHO itself points out, 'underreporting and misclassification are common, especially for deaths occurring early on in life.' For example, the U.S. tries to save extremely premature babies, many of which die and then get counted as an infant mortality. Other countries simply count these as stillbirths. In Switzerland, a baby must be at least 12 inches long to be counted as living, according to Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In Japan, 'social and cultural customs favor the recording of infant deaths as stillbirths because the latter are not recorded in the Koseki, the Japanese family registration system,' noted a report from the congressional Office of Technology Assessment. In addition, other countries have suspiciously low infant mortality rates in the first 24 hours after birth. Eberstadt found that in the U.S., Canada and Australia, more than 33% of infant deaths occurred in the first day of life. In France, just 16% died in the first day, in Luxembourg just 10%, and in Hong Kong only 4% of infant deaths occurred in the first day of life. Eberstadt concludes that these countries are artificially pushing down their infant mortality rates by counting many first-day deaths as stillbirths. All this led researchers in the American Journal of Public Health to conclude: 'The usefulness of crude infant mortality rates in international comparisons is questionable because of differences in the registration of births and deaths.' The claim that the U.S. fares far worse than other countries on life expectancy suffers a similar problem because it fails to take into account the multitude of factors other than health care that affect life expectancy. ibdeditorials.com

To: Doren who wrote (7577)	3/12/2009 3:52:28 PM
From: longnshort	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13062

Don't Fall Prey to Propaganda: Life Expectancy and Infant Mortality are Unreliable Measures for Comparing the U.S. Health Care System to Others by David Hogberg, Ph.D. How does the United States health care system fare when compared to the rest of the industrialized world? This is an important question. Accurately measuring our health care system relative to those of other nations can yield insight into the types of health care policies America should pursue. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has expressed the view that the U.S. health care system is inferior: The United States spends far more on health care than other advanced countries. Yet we don't appear to receive more medical services. And we have lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality rates than countries that spend less than half as much per person. How do we do it?1 Life expectancy and infant mortality are two measures that are widely cited, yet seldom questioned. This is unfortunate, because life expectancy and infant mortality tell us little about the efficacy of a health care system. This paper examines the deficiencies of using life expectancy and infant mortality to measure a health care system. It also examines the question: How should we measure a health care system? Why Life Expectancy and Infant Mortality are Popular Measures Type in the terms "life expectancy," "infant mortality" and "health care" into the popular search engine Google, and it will yield about 449,000 results. Clearly, linking these two measures to health care is very popular. It is easy to understand why. Life expectancy and infant mortality are powerful tools for those who support some form of socialized medicine. On those measures the United States fares worse than all other industrialized nations. Most other industrialized nations have some form of government-run, universal health insurance. Thus, the reasoning goes, America's inferior performance on life expectancy and infant mortality is due to its heavy reliance on a system of private sector care. Paul Krugman is in good company. Liberal pundit Sebastian Mallaby recently lamented that the American health care system ...achieves shorter life expectancy than the British, French, German, Canadian or Japanese systems, but it eats up 16 percent of the resources in the economy, compared with between eight and 11 percent in those other countries. The difference - six percent or so of economic output - suggests that the waste in the American system comes to $700 billion a year. He concludes that the "most plausible subsidizer of universal insurance is government, and the only entity with a stake in lifelong wellness is the government."2 A recent study that compared the U.S. to Canada and garnered some media attention used life expectancy as a measure of the efficacy of each nation's health care system. Noting that Canada spends about half as much on health care as does the U.S., the scholars stated, "Canadians live two to three years longer."3 The scholars concluded, "Universal health care attenuates inequities in health care and should be implemented in the United States."4 Physicians for a National Health Program, a vocal advocacy group, recently examined the health care systems in 16 industrialized countries. The only measures that the study used to compare the different nations were, not surprisingly, life expectancy and infant mortality.5 The Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington D.C. think tank that supports government-run health care, produced the following table. Using expenditure per capita on health care as a proxy for health care system, it shows that America spent more on health care but got less return than countries that had some form of universal health insurance. "The high costs and poor outcomes seem to stem from inefficiencies that are unique to the U.S. health care system," the Center for Economic and Policy Research claimed.6 nationalcenter.org

To: Doren who wrote (7577)	3/12/2009 5:38:23 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 13062

"...Two University of Iowa researchers, Robert L. Ohsfeldt and John E. Schneider, reviewed the data for the nations of the OECD to statistically account for the incidence of fatal injuries for the member countries. The dynamic table below presents their findings, showing both the average life expectancy from birth over the years 1980 to 1999 without any adjustment (the actual "raw" mean), and again after accounting for the effects of premature death resulting from a non-health-related fatal injury (the standardized mean)... ...If you've sorted the data in the dynamic table, you find that without accounting for the incidence of fatal injuries, the United States ties for 14th of the 16 nations listed. But once fatal injuries are taken into account, U.S. "natural" life expectancy from birth ranks first among the richest nations of the world." politicalcalculations.blogspot.com