Sensible information on the US Health Care debate

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1. I expect that many Americans would have difficulty understanding the graphs in this presentation, and, in any case, six or seven minutes is longer than their attention span. I pass out business cards with a simpler message:

   Total spending on health care, per person, 2007:

   United States: $7290
   Great Britain: $2992

   Life expectancy, 2007:

   United States 78.0
   Great Britain: 78.8

   The original stats listed numbers for the United Kingdom. I changed that to Great Britain because I’ve discovered that lots of Americans don’t know what the U.K. is.

2. We can assume that this data is already known to healthcare experts in the US but data, on its own, has little effect compared to the enormous political clout of the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

   The problem is that those industries know that they can rely on a kneejerk response by a large part of the American population. Call anything “socialist” or “socialized” in the US conjures up a paranoid fear that it will convert the country into something like China under Mao with everyone wearing the same dull, shapeless uniform and deriving all their knowledge from the same Little Red Book of Chairman Obama’s thoghts. The fact that there are religious groups in the US who would love to do just that, substituting the Bible for Mao’s Thoughts of course, seems to have escaped their attention.

3. “We can assume that this data is already known to healthcare experts in the US but data, on its own, has little effect compared to the enormous political clout of the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries.”

   Add to that the fact that the Republican Party has made abundantly clear that it has no interest in improving the system of health care in the US but only in using issues of health care to do as much damage to the president and his party as possible.

4. The strategy is staightforward.

   First, get the Democrats out of office, then pass some sort of palliative legislation, ala Medicare part D, that fattens private insurers and takes the health care issue off the table.

5. David Goldhill has recently published” a more detailed lowdown on the problems of US health care. I’m not in favour of every aspect of his solution, but I find much of it compelling.

   I’m an ardent supporter of the NHS back home, but a fact often overlooked when drawing comparisons between US and UK health care is that the NHS was implemented on the back of an increasingly centralised postwar economy. It’s not clear that, even if there was majority support for something approaching single payer, the US could afford to make such a profound change to its health infrastructure (and the job loss it would entail). Especially right now.

   “The original stats listed numbers for the United Kingdom. I changed that to Great Britain because I’ve discovered that lots of Americans don’t know what the U.K. is.”

   Really, how long have you lived in the US, and where?

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