We're #19!

As an addendum to the news I posted Tuesday that "For the first time in more than 100 years, British living standards have risen above those of Americans," I present this news about our perfect health-care system that is under attack by the many communist insurgents spread throughout our body politic. Via Washington Monthly-

A pair of researchers has just published an update that compares various countries on their rates of "amenable mortality," defined as deaths that are "potentially preventable with timely and effective health care." In 1997, the United States ranked 15th out of 19 industrialized countries. So how are we doing now?

Answer: we're now 19th out of 19. The rest of the countries have improved their performance by an average of 16%, while the U.S., that well-known engine of healthcare innovation, has improved by only 4%. So now we're in last place.

But there's a bright side: at least our healthcare isn't funded by the government, like it is in France. Keep that in mind if someone you know dies of preventable causes. Their odds would have been a whole lot better in Paris, but who'd want to live in a socialist hellhole like that anyway?

A commenter at Paul Krugman's blogs adds this crucial point: "The U.K. numbers look comparable to those of the U.S., but remember that they spend 40% of what we do per capita for health care; even France spends about half." And indeed, this to me seems one of the better arguments for a single-payer system... it's a helluva lot more efficient. As Atrios also noted a while back, "30%+ of health care expenditures in this country are spent on administrative costs.... [and] close to 5% of our GDP is spent on people pushing little bits of paper back and forth between doctors and insurance companies."

You'd think a party (rhetorically) obsessed with 'fiscal responsibility' might see that as a disaster.

Finally, there's one group advocating for universal care by focusing on one of the big hypocrisies of its opponents (among many others) in Washington DC... that all the conservative politicians who claim government-funded health-care will destroy civilization receive the best government-funded coverage around. Their slogan? "Doesn't everyone deserve CheneyCare?"

Yes. Yes they do. But they won't ever get it, because that'd make baby Reagan cry.