National health care systems tend to have the various problems of any sort of centralized economic planning (since, in essence, they are “planning” the medical/pharmaceutical economy) — big bureaucracies, politics getting in the way of care, program costs that spiral out of control, a thousand different inefficiencies.
The biggest problem with universal health care, as a principle, is that it’s an endless game. What consititutes necessary, needed, effective, efficient, and timely care will never be agreed upon, and could never be afforded, even by the richest nation on earth, even if it were agreed upon.
That said, there must be something we in the US can do to avoid stories like this. Damned if I know what it is. I tend to see the problems of specific plans more clearly than the solutions.
Our infant mortality rate is slightly higher than Cuba’s according to the CIA World Factbook. Worse than all of western Europe and Canada with their horrid, nightmarish, bureaucracy-ridden socialized systems.
Cuba. Cuba after 46 years of Fidel effing Castro. According to the C. I. A.
Republican family values indeed.
Well, assuming you can trust the figures coming out of Cuba. But, yes.
I was sort of hoping that the CIA doesn’t take the feed from the Cuban agitprop agencies straight. But you never know.
The info from Canada and Europe and Taiwan and Singapore should be pretty good though, and the American approach seems to bite donkey in comparison. If one cares about infant mortality in the USA. Ideological purity clearly ranks above actual results when it comes to infants who have left the womb, for Republicans.
That’s why I used the CIA Factbook figures.
I’m not sure that the CIA actually researches all of those numbers or puts in fudge factors when presenting them. I don’t know how much time and effort I actually want them putting into verifying IMR in Cuba, to be honest. Looking around at other locs, the numbers seem to be straight from the CDC (for the US) and the Ministry of Health (for Cuba).
This WaPo article from last year discusses a recent rise in the IMR in the US, attributing it at least in part to later childbearing, increased use of fertility treatments, and advances in fetal care and reporting changes (i.e., some of the rate is tranferred from what would have been classified previously as miscarriages/fetal mortalities).
This article echoes some of that same analysis. This PPT show goes into some more of the statistics and possible reporting changes that could be affecting the stats.
I’m not convinced that accounts for all the difference, but raw IMR may not be the be-all/end-all statistic to watch.
Subtract the recent 3% upward trend and the USA does indeed barely squeeze by Taiwan and Cuba — but not the next polity in the list, the Faroe Islands. Let alone Italy, Greece, Ireland, New Zealand, Great Britain…
The US rate has been unusually high for nearly 50 years compared to the rest of the industrialized world.
According to anti-universal care rhetoric the socialized systems should grow increasingly inefficient over time as the bureaucracy strangles them. Leading to, I would think, poorer and poorer results.
Over the same period our per-capita medical expenditures have exceeded those of the socialized states by ever-increasing margins, despite all the efforts in the last 20+ years to get the dead hand of the State out of the business.
And, of course, technology has marched on with the USA at he head of the parade. One would expect ever-better results all around but particularly here and in the other industrialized, rich nations.
More and better tech + less State meddling + more money should = steadily better results vis a vis the socialized Hells of Canada and Europe, let alone Fidel’s Cuba.
Hasn’t happened. There seems to be some flaw in the anti-universal health care theory.
On the other hand, a middle class person’s wait time for elective plastic surgery in the USA kicks ass compared to Canada or Britain. Go us!
Infant mortality is one end of the scale. The U.S. doesn’t do very well for life expectancy, either.
http://www.worldfactsandfigures.com/life_expectancy_asc.php
The last figures I could find was that 6.33 percent of GNP in the United States is spent on health care, 6.38 percent in Canada. The thing is, for that extra 0.05 per cent of our GNP we cover EVERYONE, whereas nearly half the U.S. population has no health care.
Fortunately, none of this is my worry. I live in a country with universal health care. There hasn’t been a day in the last few months that I haven’t felt intensely grateful for that.