Comparative Health Care — And the Myth of American Exceptionalism

As an American who has lived and received health care in two other industrialized Western countries (New Zealand and Australia), I know first-hand how pathetic American health care really is compared to its foreign counterparts.  Unfortunately, because most Americans know very little about how the rest of the industrialized world provides (vastly superior and much cheaper) health care, conservatives have been able to peddle wilfully false caricatures of “socialized medicine” for years.

If every American read T.R. Reid’s “Five Myths About Health Care Around the World,” that might change.  It is by far the best and most concise debunking of conservative insistence that America has the best health-care system in the world that I have ever read.  Here is a taste — Myth No. 3:

3. Foreign health care systems are inefficient, bloated bureaucracies.

Much less so than here. It may seem to Americans that U.S.-style free enterprise — private-sector, for-profit health insurance — is naturally the most cost-effective way to pay for health care. But in fact, all the other payment systems are more efficient than ours.

U.S. health insurance companies have the highest administrative costs in the world; they spend roughly 20 cents of every dollar for non-medical costs, such as paperwork, reviewing claims and marketing. France’s health insurance industry, in contrast, covers everybody and spends about 4 percent on administration. Canada’s universal insurance system, run by government bureaucrats, spends 6 percent on administration. In Taiwan, a leaner version of the Canadian model has administrative costs of 1.5 percent; one year, this figure ballooned to 2 percent, and the opposition parties savaged the government for wasting money.

The world champion at controlling medical costs is Japan, even though its aging population is a profligate consumer of medical care. On average, the Japanese go to the doctor 15 times a year, three times the U.S. rate. They have twice as many MRI scans and X-rays. Quality is high; life expectancy and recovery rates for major diseases are better than in the United States. And yet Japan spends about $3,400 per person annually on health care; the United States spends more than $7,000.

Read the whole thing.  And then send it to everyone you know.