The Many Myths Of European Health Care - by David L.Miller( New Republic)
"You hear it over and over again, in casual conversation and in serious debates among experts: If we create universal health insurance here in the U.S., then we'll end up with less responsive, less advanced medical care. Few arguments have done as much political damage to the cause of universal health care.
If it means worse health care overall, then why do so many studies show the U.S. scoring so poorly on international comparisons, including those examining "mortality amenable to health care" — a statistic devised specifically to test the quality of different health care systems across the globe?
Earlier this year, a report by McKinsey & Company — which nobody would mistake for a communist front — showed that while Americans get the most knee replacements per person over 65, Germans get the most hip replacements. (Besides, as Paul Krugman recently noted in his New York Times column, here in the U.S., Medicare pays for the majority of hip replacements. Medicare is one of those dreaded government-run programs, so it's not clear why the hip replacement example would validate conservative faith in private insurance.) Truth be told, if you really care about which country has the best health care system, you may have to answer a far more complicated question — namely, whether paying for the newest treatments, which are frequently the most expensive, is really the best way to spend money on health care. Some would argue that it makes more sense to spend that money on other treatments, like preventative care, that yield much greater improvements in health at much lower cost. This seems to be what countries like England, among the lowest-spending countries around, are trying to do.
Go to the CBS/New Republic for the complete report.
No comments:
Post a Comment