Health Care Myth #3 - "Socialized" medicine is bad for you

Chrissy asked "why are you writing about health care, folks don't seem that interested?" Good question! I've been wondering why the comments have thinned out recently (is health care boring?). Bear with me, readers, I am almost done with the Health Care Myth series. Let's wrap it up by taking on Myth #3 - that universal, single-payer government-regulated health care plans like those found in western Europe and Canada (and which we've partially implemented here in the US in Medicaid and Medicare) result in lower quality & higher costs. The vast majority of Americans believe this unquestioningly, but does it make sense?

We're just not that rational (by the way, this podcast at Cato on the myth of the rational voter is brilliant - http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2008/01/15/irrational-voters/) when it comes to health care. I began to think this a couple of months ago when a friend criticized Hillary's mandated universal coverage plan. I wondered why Hillary would propose something so distasteful as mandated coverage for all, and found that universal coverage lowers costs for everyone (not that I am all that enamored of Hillary's plan, since she lacks the cujones to propose a single-payer universal plan). But still Hillary is taking a big risk, because we Live-Free-Or-Die-Hards automatically reject any and all mandated behavior, no matter how beneficial that behavior might be.

The more I researched, the clearer became the disappointing realities of our hodge-podge "free market" American health care system. So why do so many Americans cling to this crappy, costly "free market" choice ("You can have my Blue Cross ID card when you can pry it from my cold, dead fingers.")? The only conclusion I can draw is that we Americans are (how do I put this gently?) - dumkopfs! American voters (along with the herd of poll driven politicians) are resolutely clinging to a "free market" health care system that costs us too much (see Myth #1), that delivers things we don't need (see Myth #2), and which provides a lower quality of health care than most any other western nation (see Myth #3). We absolutely refuse to consider a single-payer, universal health care plan, because...well, socialism is bad. Right?

We know that socialism is bad. The proof goes like this:
* The USSR was socialist.
* The USSR built lousy cars, baked crappy bread, and every comrade had bad teeth.
* All the bad bread and bad teeth led to the USSR's collapse.
* Ergo socialism is bad. QED.

It stands to reason that if socialism is bad, then socialized medicine must be bad. To which I say, "Not so fast, capitalism breath". There are a bunch of countries that have socialized medicine that provide much better health care than we have here in the US of A. Let's take a look at some statistics: (from http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/33/38979719.pdf):

Country	Life expect- ancy	Infant mortality rate	MDs per 1000 people	Nurses per 1000 people	Per capita spending on health (USD)	Health- care costs as a percent of GDP
Australia	80.9	5.0	2.7	10.4	3,128	9.5
Canada	80.2	5.3	2.2	10.0	3,326	9.8
France	80.3	4.0	3.4	7.7	3,374	11.1
Germany	79.0	3.9	3.4	9.7	3,287	10.7
Japan	82.0	2.8	2.0	9.0	2,358	8.0
Sweden	80.6	2.4	3.4	10.6	3,149	9.1
UK	79.0	5.1	2.4	9.1	2,724	8.3
US	77.8	6.8	2.4	7.9	6,401	15.3

Every industrialized country on this list (except us) has a form of socialized medicine. They spend half what we do on health care, and they have higher quality as measured by life expectancy, infant mortality (and a bunch of other statistics you can find on the OECD site), etc. Hmmm, all those politicians and voters who scream that socialized medicine bites the stethoscope seem to be ignoring the facts!

I even went to the Heritage Foundation (motto - "Government Sucks") to look at their statistics on government run health care (Medicare), and here's what I found - http://www.heritage.org/Research/HealthCare/wm250.cfm

• Spending for hospital and physician services by private insurance grew 18.1 percent faster than comparable Medicare spending between 1970 and 1999.
• Spending trends began to diverge in the late 1980s, coincident with Medicare’s move to price schedules and crackdowns on fraud and abuse in the traditional fee-for-service program.

Talk about cognitive dissonance. Imagine how those Heritage neo-cons must feel when their own statistics show a government regulated health care program provides better cost controls than the free market. Leapin' lizards, Ayn Rand!

And here's more, on the relative overhead of Medicare and private insurance (from http://www.medicareadvocacy.org/FAQ):

Medicare administrative costs	2% of expenditures	2004 CMS statistics (10/2004)
Private health insurance administrative costs	15% of expenditures	Kaiser, 4/2003
HMO administrative costs	20% of expenditures	Kaiser, 4/2003

Can it be, that socialized medicine might be a major improvement for us? I have come to think that it would be. Our American "free-market" for health care is an abject failure no matter how you measure it. It pales in comparision to socialized medicine, in costs and quality. So why isn't every American (Michael Moore doesn't count, in fact I get a little nervous when I find myself agreeing with him) screaming for Medicare for all of us? Why is it so hard to change, when it is this clear that single-payer, government regulated universal coverage is far superior to the quasi-free market morass of medicine we have now? Why are all the presidential candidates (the ones left standing) offering watery privatized health care recipes made from a pinch of Medicare, a drop of government finger-wagging but four cups of big pharma freedom and three pounds of private insurance? Do we voters have any clue what is best for us?

I'm not confident that we'll figure it out, but hey, maybe we'll wake up and smell the sodium pentathol. Or we can move, en masse, to Canada...