« THE END OF A FAIRY TALE | Main | Horowitz Disrupted Again »
April 15, 2005
Krugman Covers Health Care.
With predictable results. He uses misleading numbers, rules out obvious comparisons, and generally makes little sense.
Misleading numbers? Krugman hauls out the discredited statistics on life expectancy and infant mortality that are the staple of liberal arguments on this issue:
Most Americans probably don't know that we have substantially lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality figures than other advanced countries.
But this has been explained in the past.
Different countries use different definitions of a "live birth." The United States uses the guidelines from WHO's International Classification of Diseases. Here, all infants evidencing any signs of life are considered live. There were 24,000 infants weighing less than 1 kilogram at birth in 1988. Such babies have poor survival rates.
Switzerland, for example, defines infants as living only if they are at least 30 centimeters long at birth. It does not include 1 kilogram babies. Countries may also underreport infant deaths. According to Eberstadt, "In Australia, Canada, and the United States, more than a third of all infant deaths take place on the first day; in Sweden and Japan, where infant mortality rates are currently lowest, such deaths account for about a quarter of the total."
Medical care quality makes a big difference when it comes to survival rates of infants with low birthweights, and by birthweight, U.S. medical care shines. "By comparison with other Western societies enjoying especially low rates of infant mortality, U.S. babies at any given birthweight appear to have unusually good chances of surviving the perinatal period, regardless of race."[2]
And let's not forget that some countries are now aborting babies with deformities as mild as a cleft palate. It seems obvious that if you start eliminating babies at risk while still in the womb, you are decreasing the odds of post-natal deaths.
What about the horror stories from Britain and Canada about the long waiting periods for minor operations? Krugman brushes those off:
But in any case, Britain isn't the country we want to look at, because its health care system is run on the cheap, with total spending per person only 40 percent as high as ours... Canada also has waiting lists, but they're much shorter than Britain's.
It's somewhat ironic that Krugman dismisses Britain's system as run on the cheap in an article in which he argues that our system is too expensive.
He throws some more numbers at us:
In 2002, the latest year for which comparable data are available, the United States spent $5,267 on health care for each man, woman and child in the population. Of this, $2,364, or 45 percent, was government spending, mainly on Medicare and Medicaid. Canada spent $2,931 per person, of which $2,048 came from the government. France spent $2,736 per person, of which $2,080 was government spending.
Amazing, isn't it? U.S. health care is so expensive that our government spends more on health care than the governments of other advanced countries, even though the private sector pays a far higher share of the bills than anywhere else.
But of course, Krugman thinks we could spend less, lots less, and get more, lots more. And where do the savings come in? Krugman comes up with two main categories: doctor's salaries and administrative costs.
...[A]lthough average wages in France and the United States are similar, American doctors are paid much more than their French counterparts...administrative costs took 31 cents out of every dollar the United States spent on health care, compared with only 17 cents in Canada.
This highlights another problem with Krugman's columns. He picks and chooses which statistics to present to us. When he wants to compare doctors' salaries, France is the comparable, but when it's time for administrative costs, he chooses Canada. That's the mark of somebody trying to prove a point, not examine the evidence.
Posted by pat at April 15, 2005 11:26 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.lifelikepundits.com/cgi-bin/mt3/mt-tb.cgi/644