Is US Health Care Really as Bad as the Headlines?

Eli,

If you read only the headline, "US Health in International Perspective-Shorter Lives: Poorer Health," you would conclude there's a total failure of our health care providers. However, even a cursory glance at the report reveals there are many more reasons for shorter lives and poorer health in the US than health care. Which makes sense to me. I don't know about you, but it seems to me doctors and nurses are much less incompetent than they are portrayed by your buddies on the Left. (Also makes me wonder why you and your buddies on the Left regard, either implicitly or explicitly, your colleagues as such charlatans).

 Why are Americans so unhealthy asks the Committee on Population? Four answers:

• Health Systems
• Health Behaviors
• Social and Economic Conditions
• Physical Environments

So according to the the Committee on Population three-fourths of the reason we have shorter lives and poorer health has nothing to do with physician-provided care, but rather with socio-economic conditions, personal behavioral choices and physical environments.

The Committee points out Americans eat more, do more drugs, wear fewer seat belts, drive drunker or drive more often drunk, and use more guns. That doesn't say anything about health care, and it implies nothing, nothing, about the Affordable Care Act will lower health care costs. In fact, our current health care markets and the ACA encourage this behavior since the costs are born by someone else. It gets worse under the ACA since more of the costs are born by others; the marginal cost of obesity, drunk driving and guns injuries will decline. Prices down, consumption up.

The Committee also claims poverty, income inequality and social mobility contribute to shorter lives and poorer health. Not sure how income inequality and social mobility necessarily leads to poor health outcomes, and poverty is a relative concept.

Our automobile-centric lifestyle discourages exercise and contributes to obesity, according to the Committee.

Of course, the committee asserts lack of insurance and limited access to primary care as a reason for our shorter lives and poorer health, but it is interesting to me it cites so many other reasons as significant reasons for the country's poor relative outcomes, reasons that will have nothing to do with health insurance or health care.

I've read some articles questioning the statistical methods of these international comparisons. For instance, these criticisms claim definitions of live births differ across countries and different levels of care for pre-term babies who have higher mortality rates, impacts measurements of life spans and infant mortality. I've never bothered to ascertain the veracity of those claims. But if those claims are true and there are many non-health-care reasons contributing to our health care performance then our obsession with health spending as a percent of GDP is a giant waste of time.

Bill