Criticism of the American Health Care System

The various problems with the American healthcare system are a frequent topic of debate amongst the editors here at The Pasty Quail. Can you tell which side these guys fall on?

The study mentioned in that article is even better than the piece itself. Schoen, et al. compare 8 nations, 7 of which have universal healthcare: Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Their findings are suspect at best, and border on the ridiculous. Who woulda thunk it, but the citizens of the United States pay the most per capita for health care, and are more likely to go without care because of money. Here's another little tidbit:

"In the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands, where adults can switch their basic insurance coverage, we asked about changing plans in the past three years. German rates were relatively stable, with only 10 percent switching. In the Netherlands, at a time with new choices, 25 percent switched in the past three years. U.S. adults reported the most frequent changes: 32 percent had switched, and 14 percent had done so more than once (data not shown)."

[Two things, just for the record: (a) The healthcare systems in Germany and The Netherlands allow competition by private insurance firms on everything but price, which is set by those respective governments, (b) and that "data not shown" is theirs, not mine.]

One last nugget of wisdom:

"Based on responses about having a regular source of care with easy contact by phone, knowledge of medical history, and care coordination, the findings indicate that only about 50–60 percent of adults across countries have a primary care source with key attributes of a medical home. In the United States, having such a relationship depended on insurance and income: Insured and higher-income patients were significantly more likely than uninsured and lower-income patients to have a medical home (53 percent of the insured compared with 26 percent of the uninsured for adults under age sixty-five; 58 percent above-average compared with 42 percent below-average income for all ages)."

There are some very real problems with the healthcare system in America: not enough people have access to basic healthcare, especially amongst the poor and the elderly. And the systems we have that are designed to help those people get access to the services they need are woefully insufficient. These topics, and a few others (like the role that HMO's play in determining the level of care received by the insured party), would make great topics for comparative healthcare surveys.

Unfortunately, this study doesn't touch those subjects. Instead, the writers slant the survey so far to one side of the issue as to render their own findings worthless. Even worse than that, they have removed the focus of the debate from the issues that we can solve, those issues that do deserve our attention.

Mark Twain once said "There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics." This survey is a great example of that point. By asking questions that skew the focus away from the issues that matter, and instead focusing on a political agenda, the writers have concocted a pile of data that means nothing; they have robbed the very people they are attempting to help.