Angry Citizen said:
Y'know, I hate it when people try to pull a fast one on someone like me. This is not the least bit true, and I have documentation to prove it. Medicare and Medicaid account for about 36% of all health dollars spent in the US, and given that they service the most needy people (poor and unhealthy people, and old/disabled people), this number is a great example of how socialized programs work better.
I'd say it's an example of how unworkable they are, because their costs have been increasing exponentially. At some point, rationing is going to be implemented into Medicare (beyond what it already is) because the government won't be able to handle the very high costs. The UK, Norway, Canada, and Sweden all have both had to deal with rationing due to excessive healthcare costs in their single-payer systems (http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/download/fulltext/8111101ec059.pdf?expires=1328472063&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=4CDF768AD187B3CD220DE922738CE679), with Sweden partially privatizing theirs.
Angry Citizen said:
Despite the wide gaps, higher spending on health care does not necessarily prolong lives. In 2000, theUnited States spent more on health care than any other country in the world: an average of $ 4,500 per person. Switzerland was second highest, at $3,300 or 71% of the US.
Switzerland has one of the best healthcare systems in the world, so I don't know if spending a lot of money on healthcare is a bad sign. The U.S. spends more per capita on public education than most everyone as well, and that is a socialist system, so I doubt nationalizing the healthcare system would make things become cheaper.
Nevertheless, average US life expectancy ranks 27th in the world, at 77 years. Many countries achieve higher life expectancy rates with significantly lower spending. The chart below shows the top 30 countries in the world ranked by life expectancy. The red line indicates per-capita health expenditure (right axis), and shows that many countries outperform the US with approximately half the spending.
That's because the life expectancy calculation doesn't correct for car accidents and homicides. A LOT of Americans die each year from car accidents and homicides. If you remove those two variables from the life expectancy calculation, you get a much better result. Two economists in 2006, Robert L. Ohsfeldt and John E. Schneider, performed a study in which they did just this and found that when corrected, the U.S. life expectancy jumps to number one. Their method has been criticized, and the authors said that they aren't sure of the exact numbers, but that they wanted to point out how the statistic can jump around depending on how it is calculated (and if one is going to use life expectancy as a way to compare the quality of healthcare systems, things like car accidents and murders need to be accounted for in computing it):
LINK1 http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/does-the-us-lead-in-life-expectancy-223/
The U.S. also ranks very high in cancer survival rates, whereas the UK lags behind the advanced countries in this (
LINK). Other countries such as Norway and Sweden rank fairly well in cancer survival rates, so I mean while not always meaning bad treatment, socialized medicine doesn't guarantee great quality treatment nor does a more privatized system like the U.S. has mean lack of it.
