Another Fairly Insane Cross‐National Health Care Comparison
Yesterday, countless newspapers published a really disappointing story by Noam Levey that the Los Angeles Times ran under this title:
The article is little more than a puff piece for the hotly contested idea of universal coverage. It gives zero space to the competing strain of thought that the less the government does for the poor, the sick, and the vulnerable, the better off they will be.
It quotes “Dr. Julio Frenk, a former health minister in Mexico and dean of the Harvard School of Public Health” as saying, “As countries advance, they are realizing that creating universal healthcare systems is a necessity for long‐term economic development.” A necessity? Gosh. It’s a wonder the United States ever became the world’s largest economy.
It speaks of such government guarantees as being popular, when what it really means to say is that people are dependent on the government for their health care and frightened to death that someone might take it away.
It laments the fact that the United States is an “outlier” because it fails to guarantee access to health care for all citizens, which “stands in stark contrast to America’s historic leadership in education…Long before most European countries, the United States ensured access to public schooling.” Yet it makes no mention of how U.S. students fare poorly in comparison to those in other advanced countries.
It devotes no time to the costs of such guarantees, other than to say that they are sometimes “more than twice what was expected.” But don’t worry, those costs are borne by the government. It does not say where governments get all that money. I guess we’ll never know.
Speaking of taxes, it makes no mention of how taxes suppress economic development. Evidently, unlike other taxes, those that support government‐run health care systems do not incur the deadweight loss of taxation.
But the article was at its most ridiculous when it suggested that the health care sectors in poor countries like Rwanda and Ghana might possibly be ahead of the United States in any way whatsoever. As I have written about Rwanda:
The United States generates many of the HIV treatments currently fighting Rwanda’s AIDS epidemic, as well as other medical innovations saving lives there and around the world. More than any other nation, we create the wealth that purchases those and other treatments for Rwandans and other impoverished peoples. The United States is probably closer to providing universal access to medical care for its citizens — and, indeed, the whole world — than Rwanda. Rwanda’s “universal” system leaves 8 percent of its population uninsured. Though official estimates put the U.S. uninsured rate at 15.4 percent, the actual percentage is lower; and again, uninsured Americans typically have better access to care than insured Rwandans. The real paradox is here that Rwandan elites think the United States is doing something wrong.
Unfortunately, it’s not just the Rwandan elites. For my thoughts on how sensible people can make such insensible comparisons between the United States and other nations, read the rest of my post on Rwanda.
