The American Spectator

The Public Policy

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A study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal compared a host of studies that looked at the rate of adverse events in hospitals (a disability, prolonged hospital stay or death caused by hospital error) in different countries. The U.S. had much lower rates of adverse events than hospitals in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K. The data wasn't completely comparable across studies; for example, some studies left out death as part of their definition of adverse events. But even if the rates of death in those had been twice what it was in the Canadian study, the U.S. would still come out well ahead.

Finally, a study in the British Journal of Surgery compared patients in the U.S. and U.K. who had major surgery (except cardiac surgery.) The study controlled for the patients' risk of death prior to surgery. Despite this, the rate of mortality post-surgery was four times higher in the U.K. than in the U.S.

p>Yet Holt's Spot-On article points to data showing that we lag other nations on some important health care indicators: br> /p>

But there is a much simpler way to get the free marketeers off the topic. It's been known for a while that the U.S. is not as good at dealing with reducing foot amputation for diabetics as the Australians, Finns or Canadians. It's nowhere near as good at keeping heart attack victims alive as the Danes, the Swiss or the Icelanders. But this doesn't have to be an argument in which the universal health care proponents have to defend the evils of socialized medicine. Nope, the only question you need to ask the free marketeers is, "Why are you so happy to have a health care system that kills so many more people who have heart attacks, and amputates the feet of so many more diabetics?"

br> Holt is now doing what he accuses the free marketeers of doing, ignoring cultural factors. Surely many cultural factors affect diabetes, especially diet. Indeed, treating diabetes properly is far more dependent on the patients' daily habits than it is on treatment from a health care system. As for the data on heart attacks, it came from OECD data on the 30 day-survival rate for acute myocardial infarctions (AMI). But the OECD admits (pdf) that "no evidence on the reliability of international comparisons using AMI coding exists," and an "important threat to reliability is the fact that constructing case-fatality rates requires following patients after hospital discharge, which is not possible in many countries for data limitations and confidentiality reasons."

Holt's loaded question, then, is based on the false premise that our health care system kills more people who have heart attacks and results in more amputees. But even if I accepted the premise, my response is that while I agree that there are serious problems with the U.S. health care system, I disagree on the solution. I think we need less government involvement and more freedom in the health care system, thereby letting free markets function properly. Holt would rather have us establish a government single-payer system.

Yet all of the studies I pointed to above compare the U.S. with single-payer systems. Since they show that single-payer systems are inferior in some vital ways, let me end this by asking Holt a question: Why do you want to give the U.S. a health care system that leads to more sickness and death?

David Hogberg is a Washington writer and host of the website Health Hog.

topics:
Health Care, Law