Here is a must-read article from my friend Matt Palumbo at the American Thinker. It’s extremely high quality. (I removed the links in my excerpt – but he linked all the sources in his post)
Excerpt:
The oft-cited “46 million uninsured” is breathtakingly easy to break down to size. Keep in mind that there is overlap in the following statistics, as many people listed in them belong to multiple categories. Around 10 million of the uninsured aren’t even citizens. Another 8 million are aged 18-24, which is the group least prone to medical problems. The average salary of a person in this age group is $31,790, so affording health care would not be a problem. Seventeen million of the uninsured make over $50,000 a year, and within that group, 8 million make over $75,000. These people are usually referred to as the “voluntarily uninsured.” Another large group of these 46 million are uninsured in name only, as they are eligible for government programs that they haven’t signed up for. Estimates on how large this group is vary, the range being from 5.4 million as estimated by the Kaiser Family Foundation to as large as one third of all the uninsured, as estimated by BlueCross BlueShield. The number of people without care because they cannot afford it is around 6 million — still a large number, but a fraction of 46 million, and no reason to restructure the entire health care system.
Then comes the issue of lifespan. Of all attempts to discredit the American system, lifespan has been the worst. Although lifespan gives a good indicator of a nation’s health at a glance, it does have its problems under analysis. We get a strange paradox when examining two statistics: life expectancy and cancer survival rates. Estimates vary on how we rank exactly; the World Fact Book showing that we rank as poorly as 50th worldwide. Even the best estimates in our favor place us far behind most developed nations. Despite this, the United States excels at cancer survival. Of the 16 most common cancers, the United States has the highest survival rate for 13 of them. Overall, the five-year cancer survival rate for men in the States is 66.3%, and 47.3% in Europe. Women have an advantage too, with a survival rate of 62.9% in the States, and 55.8% in Europe. So that said, how is it that our system takes better care of us, and doesn’t grant added lifespan to boot? Quite simply, the lifespan measurement commonly cited doesn’t factor in many variables which shorten lifespan, many of which medical care cannot prevent. Among these factors are murders, suicides, obesity, and accidents.
He looks at the uninsured number, the infant mortality rate, and other interesting things in the article, showing how the statistics that impugn the US health care system have been misused. There are some good articles linked, like this post from Commentary magazine by Scott Atlas, entitled “The Worst Study Ever?”. Atlas is the same guy who listed out how the US health care system compares to others, which I blogged about before.
You can check out Matt’s blog “The Conscience of a Young Conservative“. Not sure how scalable that blog name is. Because of the “young” part, not because of the conscience or conservative part.
WINTERY KNIGHT 