Why US Health Care Is the Best in the World

By: Bernard Chazelle

In a recent survey of 1,026 U.S. adults,

55 percent said they thought the United States has the best quality [medical] care of any country.

Easy to see why:

The U.S. has the worst mortality rate from treatable conditions of 18 other industrialized countries. In other words, get sick here and you’re more likely to die than you are in Canada, France, Britain and 15 other countries. Our mortality rate after age 75 is 50 percent higher than in France, Japan, Spain, Italy, Canada and Australia. The U.S. is 20th of 21 developed nations for child well-being, reflecting high infant mortality rates, a high percentage of low-birth-weight infants, and a low rate of immunizations. The U.S. is 28th in healthy life expectancy at 69 years. In Japan it’s 75. 47 million Americans have no health insurance. Only 55 percent of U.S. patients get treatments that scientific studies show to work. Estimated 44,000 to 98,000 annual deaths from medical mistakes in hospitals and to "amenable mortality"—deaths preventable by medical care. Those total about 101,000 a year, [which] puts America dead last of the study's 19 industrialized countries. The United States is well behind other developed countries on measures from cancer survival to diabetes care that cannot entirely be blamed on the rich-poor or insured-uninsured gulf.

Such prowess does not come cheap: US medical expenses per capita are the highest in the world, about twice the average in the industrialized world. Normal people might want to follow the money trail to see where it leads. Not Newsweek! In vintage MSM fashion, we're told things are so bad because that's what we, the people, want:

we “prize individual choice and resist limiting care [..] We choose to hold these values. Consequently, we choose to have a more expensive system than Europe or Canada”—and one that does not keep us healthier or alive longer.

Good thinking. It's my very own choice that all medical bills should exceed $350, especially when I see a doctor for a total of 2 minutes and 45 seconds. Dunno about you, but me I choose to get 12 insurance forms sent to my house, all written in Swahili in a font size that only my home electron microscope can decipher. I demand that no reimbursement should ever exceed $2.35. I choose that all complaints be referred to an automated phone tree that automatically hangs up on me at Step 15. I demand a $500 EKG every time I get a splinter in my big toe. Hey, if my toe is bad, just think how bad my heart must be! And when I run a high fever, I insist on being told the magic words, "No doctor available for 2 weeks; go to the ER!" There I get to meet all sorts of interesting people and give them a chance to inhale the flu viruses I am busy coughing out. And since Big Pharma has been incapable of discovering any new molecule in the last two decades, I insist on paying hundreds of dollars for an ancient rebranded medication whose generic version is readily available from Indian labs for 25 cents. I cherish my belief that the essence of medicine is paper-pushing, and I am so relieved to know that more than half of US medical expenses have nothing to do with caring for people's health.

As Newsweek puts it,

[T]he problem with our health-care system is that we persist in thinking like Americans.

and in reading Newsweek.

— Bernard Chazelle

Posted at December 12, 2008 03:30 PM

