From: John Scull (jscull@island.net)
Date: Wed Jul 14 2004 - 22:30:17 BST
Hi Platt,
> Headline in the UK Sun newspaper this morning:
>
> "Filthy NHS wards kill 5,000 a year."
[snip]
> Kerry and Hillary want a similar low quality system for the U.S.
>
> Thanks, but no thanks.
Hi Platt,
I'm not sure it's helpful to base policy decisions on newspaper articles. Per
capita health expenditures in the UK are only about 40% of those in the US, yet
people in the UK experience a 1.1-year longer life expectancy and lower rates of
infant mortality, childhood death, maternal death, and other indicators of
health than does the population of the US.
Canadians spend about 56% as much as Americans on health care and do much better
than the British on all available measures of population health, with a life
expectancy 2.2 years longer than Americans. In fact, there are 27 countries,
all with publicly supported health system, with longer life expectancies than
the US.
So while the US leads the world in health spending, they are about 27th in
health. It would appear that publicly funded systems produce healthier people
per dollar of expenditure than the private US system.
As Galbraith suggests, it might not be helpful to base policy decisions on
ideology, either. From experience in various jurisdictions, publicly-funded
health care seems like a good idea. This does not tell us anything about the
relative value of public or private funding of other goods and services, nor
does it tell us how to efficiently organize a healthcare system. It only tells
us that the private US system doesn't work as well as public systems in other
places.
John
ps. Stats are based on the 2000 Millennium Human Development Report from the UN.
It's on the web; if anyone wants the URL, I can look it up.
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Jul 15 2004 - 05:28:04 BST