| Mendicate Bias said:
While I admit some of our health outcomes are as a result of an American lifestyle, we still rank low in health indicators that have nothing to do with lifestyle. We are 34th in the world when it comes to infant mortality rate. In fact looking at our closest neighbor in Canada, the only way in which we are more healthy than them is our lower rate of cigarette smoking. US residents have higher rates of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, arthritis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. This is because almost every person in first world countries other than the US have a regular doctor that they see on a consistent basis. This leads to preventative medicine, instead of reactive medicine. Treating someone once a disease has already become chronic is not an optimal system. You can point to wait times for procedures being longer in Canada, however studies have shown that only elective procedures have increased wait times, essential procedures have the exact same time frame. In fact there is not a single recorded case of a death due to procedure wait times in Canada. Your next point assumes that it would take a limitless amount of money to ensure everyone has healthcare which is completely untrue. By nationalizing healthcare and insuring that health care is no longer a for-profit business we would significantly decrease costs. Looking at the amount spent on healthcare as a percentage of gdp, US spends 17.4 percent of gdp to Norway's 9.6 percent. So the US spends a higher percentage of its gdp than Norway, which has the most nationalized healthcare system in the developed world. This holds true across the board, including countries like Switzerland, Netherlands and Luxembourg. Oh and by the way, all these countries are healthier than us too.
|
Which might have something to do with why they spend less on health care. A cause, rather than an effect.
We also spend a great deal more per capita on education than every European country save Switzerland and Norway (and Luxembourg, which isn't so much a country as a rumpus room with an anthem), with much poorer results to show for it. I can't see why full nationalization of the health care sector would go any better. Trying to make the wasteful Leviathan that is the US federal government run like these little boutique countries seems like a fool's errand to me.
