The debate over the Obama drive to universalize heath care along Canadian Medicare lines has polarized opinion. If you read a certain set of data, you come away convinced that the Canadian system is God’s gift to mankind. Read another set and you’d vote for anything but our system. No wonder the American public are balking at Obama’s smooth-talking promotion of a Canadian-style health system. They’re confused.
The most persuasive argument I’ve yet seen includes data that has me tilting toward the American status quo with a few tweakings (definitely tort reform and insurance across state lines), and they can be found in an article by Fred Barnes, executive editor of the popular conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard. The September 21 edition article, entitled “An Unnecessary Operation: Obamacare threatens what’s right with American health care,” cuts a derisive swath through the America-bashing jeremiads of proponents of a state-run system.
Barnes begins bullishly: He states that 89% of Americans in a June 2009 ABC/USA Today Kaiser Family Foundation survey declared themselves satisfied with their health care (which obviously includes many of the oft-cited 40% of Americans without health insurance). Other polls, Barnes says, find the same numbers. He notes that It isn’t every country that can attract 400,000 foreign patients a year for medical care, but America does because you can get timely access, the full gamut of cutting-edge drugs and the most innovative diagnostic and surgical technology in the world there, not to mention the world’s top medical specialists.
You want an MRI or a CT? The U.S. has 27 MRIs per million Americans; Canada and Britain have 6 per million citizens. The U.S. has 34 CT scanners against Canada’s 12 and Britain’s 8 per million. U.S. insurance policies provide wider coverage than most government plans, which is why American patients are out of pocket only 12.6 percent of total national health spending, one of the lowest of the world’s advanced nations: lower than Germany, Japan, Canada and most European countries with government-run systems, according to Tom Miller of the American Enterprise Institute.
Let’s talk cancer, everyone’s greatest fear. Two major studies published in the September 2007 Lancet compared five-year survival rates for American and European cancer patients. Their findings: For all cancers, 66.3% of American men and 63.9% of women survived, as against 47.3% of European men and 55.8% of European women. Not a trivial disparity. Looking at the most common cancers, more than 99% of U.S. men with prostate cancer survived more than five years, as compared to 77.5% of European men. The U.S. colon cancer success rate for five years is 65.5% and 56.2% in Europe. Breast cancer: 90.1% for Americans, 79% for europeans. The bottom line is that you will live longer in America with these diseases than elsewhere. According to Dr Scott Atlas, chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical School, “Breast cancer mortality is 52% higher in Germany than in the United States and 88% higher in the the United Kingdom” “Prostate cancer mortality is 604% higher in the U.K. and 457% higher in Norway. The mortality rte for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40% higher.” Gulp.
Dr Atlas flings a dart Canada’s way as well: “Breast cancer mortality in Canada is 9% higher than in the United States, prostate cancer is 184% higher, and colon cancer among men is about 10 percent higher.” Feeling peaky yet? A study by Samuel Preston and Jessica Ho of the University of Pennsylvania found that “death rates from breast and prostate cancer declined during the past 20 years by much more in the U.S. than in 15 comparison countries of Europe and Japan…These results suggest that the U.S. health care system does deliver better control over serious diseases than systems in other advanced countries.” Success is attributed to the U.S. hegemony in early detection and treatment with cutting-edge drugs. American insurance covers virtually all prevention-targeting tests, such as mammograms (9 out of 10 American women get them) and Pap smears (96% of American women get them). While PSA tests for men are only now coming under Medicare in certain areas, in the U.S. 54% of men have had the test, which doubtless accounts for the spectacular American success in treatment of that most common male disease.
On to heart disease! David Brown of the Washington Post characterizes the transformation of heart disease treatment as “wildly successful.” He says that “Today, someone having a heart attack [in America] who gets to a hospital in time is likely to get cardiac catheterization, angioplasty, the placement of a medicatd stent, therapy with four anti-coagulant drugs and, on discharge, a handful of lifetime prescriptions,” all innovations of the last 50 years. “In the 1960s, the chance of dying in the days immediately after a heart attack was 30 to 40%. In 1975, it was 27%. In 1984, it was 19%. In 1994, it was about 10%. Today, it’s about 6%.” Hey, where do I get my green card?
Wait, according to Brown, it gets better: “In 1970, the death rate from coronary heart disease was 448 per 100,000 people. In 1980, it was 345. In 1990, it was 250. In 2000, it was 187. In 2006, it was 135.” Americans also have better access to cholesterol-reducing statins: “Some 56% of Americans who could benefit from statin drugs…are taking them,” according to Dr Atlas. “By comparison…only 36% of the Dutch, 29% of the Swiss, 26% of Germans, 23% of Britons, and 17% of Italians receive them.”
It is true that the U.S. spends 17% of GDP on health care, but since more lives are being saved, well, do the math. Moreover, Barnes warns us not to trust the World Health Organization (WHO) statistics on everything. For example, on infant mortality, the U.S. received a ranking from the WHO of 29th in the world, based on government reports – that is, not WHO numbers. But while all babies that show signs of life at birth in the U.S. are counted as live births, even if they die within hours, some countries don’t count babies who die within 24 hours, or those under a certain weight are counted as stillborn .
As for life expectancy statistics (the U.S. average is 78 years), that’s largely a factor of social phenomena such as diet, lifestyle and crime rates, rather than a health care issue. The fact is that if you reach 80 in America, your chances of reaching 90 “are at least as good and probably better than anyone else’s in the world.” Over to you, state single-system provider boosters.
Editor’s note: Please also see the closely related column by Ann Coulter today, called “A Statistical Analysis of Maritime Unemployment Rates, 1946-1948. Just Kidding, More Liberal Lies About National Healthcare!”
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