Health Care Debate

I had an amusing argument with Malcolm this weekend. He repeated many of the classic cliches we've heard from the right over the past many days. He was completely agog when I went to the interwebs and showed him the statistics showing that America is not the perfect health care utopia that he keeps hearing about on Fox News. Some amusing falsehoods and facts to point out to that Republican you meet at the dinner party who just can't understand why we need to fix anything with health care:

1) We have the #1 life expectancy in the world - Actually, we don't. Depending on how you count certain city/state entities like Hong Kong, we're either #30 or #45.

2) We have the #1 health care system in the world - Actually, we don't. Again, we're in the mid 30's. Now, this one is a particularly common misconception because there are often news stories playing about how "king mucky muck of XYZ is coming to the US for ABC operation." Those stories, by the way, are absolutely true, and not at all misleading. If you have 8 bajillion dollars in the bank, and can afford the most cutting edge specialist on the planet, where does than man (or woman) probably live? The US. This does not mean our "system" is the best, or that any average person will end up seeing the doctor who worked on King Mucky Muck. To measure the quality of the overall system you should likely take many factors into account, like waiting times, access to care, life expectancy, infant mortality, etc. Many of these things are what the WHO report measured, and we came up #37, not #1. Yes, Costa Rica came out ahead of us...by a few...

3) We have a low infant mortality rate - Well, of the 180+ countries in the world, yes, we're in the top 25%. In fact, we rank better here than in either of the two previous indices, ranking #33, right behind New Caledonia, Brunei, and Cuba. Yes folks, we have a higher infant mortality rate than Cuba. Does this mean I'd rather live in Cuba? Hell no, I'm just saying, if I were a woman having a baby, the statistics of my baby living are better in Cuba than they are here on the whole.

Now, the nay-sayers and right wingers will now throw their temper tantrum about how I'm an evil liberal who hates America. Not really. I rather like America. It's just that our health care system sucks pretty bad, being among the worst for all first world nations. And I'm really sick of people lying. Malcolm did not know these things were true, and readily conceded when I showed him facts. But he's not a senator or a talking head; I don't expect him to know these things when all his info comes from Fox news. However, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have some culpability here. People are literally dying every single day because our system doesn't work, and Beck and Limbaugh are arguing in favor of the current system.

For those of you who don't want "government-run health care," I openly ask you to sign wavers giving up your VA insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid. All if these systems work really well, have low costs per patient (often less than 1/2 of the cost per patient of private insurers), and are centralized, evil government-run bureaucratic nightmares. Yet somehow, with all the horrible government bureaucrats, the patients get served and the overhead administration costs 1/10 of the percentage that private plans pay. Yes, that was 1/10, as in 10%, or what private plans pay in overhead. The average private plan pays between 25-35% on overhead on administration; medicare is between 2-4%, depending on what year you look at....

Take that and stuff your sausage with it Rush...