By Sally C. Pipes
Wednesday, December 01, 2021
The most tedious allegation that critics of the U.S.
health-care system make is that we spend exorbitantly for poorer results compared with
socialized systems in other rich countries. It underpins the Democrats’ ongoing
mission to expand Medicare and levy price controls on prescription
drugs.
But these critics distort the truth. If a person is going
to get sick — and we all are at some point — there’s no better place to do so
than the United States.
The drive to give the federal government more control
over our health care derives political nourishment from organizations such as
the Commonwealth Fund, which recently released a report ranking the U.S.
health-care system dead last relative to ten other high-income countries.
The fund and its fellow travelers identify “equity” as
their lodestar, extolling the virtues of systems that offer universal insurance
and make equal treatments available across class lines.
But that’s a flawed methodology. Government-run systems
simply guarantee equal access to long waits for care.
Take Canada, where I grew up. Patients face a median wait
of nearly six months between getting a general practitioner’s referral and
receiving treatment from a specialist. While the average emergency-room wait
time in the United States is about 40 minutes, ER wait times in Nova Scotia
averaged two and a half hours this summer — the highest they’d been in four
years.
In July, one overworked physician said his Quebec
hospital was “on the verge of a breakdown.”
Long waits are endemic to socialized health-care systems.
One analysis from the United Kingdom warns that the country’s National Health
Service will have 14 million patients on waiting lists for routine treatment by
next fall. Even the Commonwealth Fund admits that patients in other rich
countries “face longer wait times for specialty care” than in the United
States.
Detractors of the U.S. health system also tend to ignore
evidence that mitigates the United States’ poor performance on some health
metrics.
For instance, the United States ranks last among the
Commonwealth Fund’s eleven rich countries in life expectancy. But the
unpleasant truth is that Americans kill each other at a rate seven times higher
than in other high-income countries. And no health-care system in the world can
revive the dead.
It’s not just homicides. We’re twice as obese as other
rich countries. We die in car crashes and from drug overdoses at nearly four
times the rate of such peer nations as Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.
There’s also wide regional variation in health outcomes
throughout the United States. A study published in the Journal of the
American Medical Association found that “the life expectancy of
Minnesota, a state comparable in size and demographics to Sweden or Denmark,
has more similar population health outcomes to these countries than Minnesota
has in comparison to Mississippi.”
Then there’s infant mortality, where the United States
routinely ranks lower than our peers. Yet countries report births differently
around the globe. France counts only the babies born after the 22-week mark,
while Poland imposes a one-pound, two-ounce threshold.
In contrast, the United States reports every live birth.
And our doctors work to save more premature babies than in any other developed
nation. Thanks to superior care and medical technology here in the States, most
of those preterm babies survive. And the Herculean effort we undertake to
rescue babies that other rich countries don’t even count as live births skews our
infant mortality rate higher.
It’s this combination — talented doctors working with the
best tools and the newest research — that lifts the U.S. health-care system
above the rest and allows us to provide the best possible care when folks fall
ill.
Indeed, the United States has lower cancer-mortality
rates than nearly all of its peers. We also screen for those cancers more often
than almost any other country, allowing doctors to catch the disease and treat
it earlier. For instance, 80 percent of women between the ages of 50 and 69
were screened for breast cancer in the United States in 2019. In Switzerland,
France, and Germany, on the other hand, only half of women in the same age
group received a breast-cancer screening.
The American health-care system needs many fixes. But
when it matters most, there’s no place I’d rather get sick.
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