Via Dave Price the Hoover Institute has produced a list of the many successes of the U. S. healthcare system. These include significantly better survival rates in the United States for many forms of cancer than in our European or Canadian counterparts, and the often-reported role of United States in medical research. Here’s an aspect of that I found most interesting:
The top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other developed country. Since the mid- 1970s, the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology has gone to U.S. residents more often than recipients from all other countries combined. In only five of the past thirty-four years did a scientist living in the United States not win or share in the prize. Most important recent medical innovations were developed in the United States.
I wish the article were footnoted.
All of these things would be very good news, indeed, if our present system were sustainable. It isn’t. The question then becomes whether we can maintain these successes or not and how. I note that a significant number of the items on the list are direct benefits of the over-consumption to which many critics attribute the problems in the current system.
Big-time, along with more specific explanations for what his standard of survival is. He quotes prostate cancer mortality for the UK as being 602% greater than in the US, without referring to whether this is measuring it on a five-year-term, or what. Factcheck.org, for example, points out that the five-year survival rate for prostate cancer in the UK is 74.4% versus the US’s 98.4%.
In addition to that, he throws around some numbers without sources or context, such as his point about waiting time (“sometimes more than a year”). Then he does some weird points, like pointing out dissatisfaction among Europeans and Canadians with their health care systems, and then doing a point about how Americans view their own health care treatment (specifically opposing this with how Americans view their health care system).
It’s a strange essay. About the only point of his I would take is the point about screening – there is a much more aggressive effort to get cancer screening in the US than in much of Europe, particulary with breast and prostate cancer. Even then, is that supposed to support the current system? Who sponsors and promotes that screening?
The US also has a significantly larger population, with greater medical research funding, doctors, and hospitals in absolute numbers, which allows them to devote much more resources to research and development than any other single first-world country.
We’d really need to compare per capita medical research spending between countries to get a good idea on how effective US medical research spending is – the “most innovations” (of which he doesn’t name any) and Nobel Prizes may simply be a result of there simply being that many more doctors, researchers, and research funding in the US.
The greatest flaw is that he doesn’t seem to realize that there’s a direct relationship between the increased level of screening and better five year survival rates that nullifies the significance of both. Here’s an example. Let’s say you’ve got prostate cancer which, if it were possible to know it, will kill you when you’re 65. If you detect it when you’re 58, you’ll pass the five year survival; if you detect it when you’re 61, you won’t. Increased screening means earlier detection but not necessarily an improvement in life expectancy.
“All of these things would be very good news, indeed, if our present system were sustainable. It isn’t.”
This is rather a flawed statement. The United states does not have a system.
You think it does?
– What is the name of the system?
– When was it founded?
– Who is the administrator?
– Where is the headquarters?
– How do I contact them?
Now that this rubbish is out of the way, let’s talk about what medical care is in the US. it is split roughly half and half between the free market and direct government systems. The government systems (medicare/medicaid, Social Security programs, the VA) are all totally unsustainable… all are taking on water and sinking.
The free market, on the other hand, is fully sustainable, and self scaling/re-prioritizing.
So in a way, you are right… there are systems in the US, but they are all government run, and they are all failing.
The non-system (the free market in health products/services) is producing more than it is consuming.