From: J. Andrew Rogers (andrew@ceruleansystems.com)
Date: Sun Apr 20 2008 - 13:00:15 MDT
On Apr 20, 2008, at 1:03 AM, BillK wrote:
> True - the US has the best treatment in health care.
>
> Unfortunately, it also has the worst.
>
> Large sections of the population are inadequately treated, and large
> sections are over-charged for what they get, so the average pushes the
> US way down the league table of health service.
It is kind of hard to have large sections of the population being
inadequately treated in fact while still maintaining the best outcome
statistics in the world and among the very highest medical life
expectancies (i.e. after removing homicide, accidents, and similar).
If the aggregate statistics across the population are as good as they
are *and* you have large populations being inadequately treated in
substantial ways, then the US must have a large population that is
enjoying nearly perfect medical outcomes across all diseases to
produce the statistical results we are seeing. Unfortunately, I do
not think anyone is making the assertion that a large population is
getting medical outcomes that radically outperform the average for the
United States, which is already the best, though as a consequence it
is hard to square the assertion that a large population is receiving
material substandard medical results by, say, European standards.
All of which assumes that the measure of "adequate treatment" is
positive medical outcomes. Perhaps you have some other criteria for
what constitutes adequate healthcare.
Of course, the United States has socialized medicine, it just is not a
Federal function. One of the great lies of the universal healthcare
debate is that there is not a public healthcare system now; what does
not exist now is a public *Federal* system. I grew up using the
public healthcare system, so it sure is funny to hear about its non-
existence. Using the same reasoning, universal public education did
not exist until the mid-20th century in the United States.
J. Andrew Rogers
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