Healthcare Smack-down: US vs. UK

In the Spectator (UK), James Bartholomew compares America's hodge-podge healthcare with British socialized medicine:

Which is better — American or British medical care? If a defender of the National Health Service wants to win the argument against a free market alternative, he declares, ‘You wouldn’t want healthcare like they have in America, would you?’

That is the knock-out blow. Everyone knows the American system is horrible. You arrive in hospital, desperately ill, and they ask to see your credit card. If you haven’t got one, they boot you out. It is, surely, a heartless, callous, unthinkable system. American healthcare is unbridled capitalism, red in the blood of the untreated poor.

Bartholomew's results might surprise:

The answer is clear. If you are a woman with breast cancer in Britain, you have (or at least a few years ago you had, since all medical statistics are a few years old) a 46 per cent chance of dying from it. In America, your chances of dying are far lower — only 25 per cent. Britain has one of the worst survival rates in the advanced world and America has the best.

If you are a man and you are diagnosed as having cancer of the prostate in Britain, you are more likely to die of it than not. You have a 57 per cent chance of departing this life. But in America you are likely to live. Your chances of dying from the disease are only 19 per cent. Once again, Britain is at the bottom of the class and America at the top.

How about colon cancer? In Britain, 40 per cent survive for five years after diagnosis. In America, 60 per cent do. With cancer of the esophagus, survival rates are low all round the world. In Britain, a mere 7 per cent of patients live for five years after diagnosis. In America, the survival rate is still low, but much better at 12 per cent.

The more one looks at the figures for survival, the more obvious it is that if you have a medical problem your chances are dramatically better in America than in Britain.

Bartholomew's clear-eyed about the flaws of the U.S. system. Intriguingly, he concludes (as I've previously suggested) poverty isn't the problem:

The seriously poor do not get the worst of it. They get treated for free.

They get Medicaid, the national subsidy for healthcare for the poor. Their treatment is paid for by the state and subsidised by the hospital, or rather its other patients and — if it is a for-profit hospital — the shareholders. The poor might not get showered with as many diagnostic tests as those with full insurance, but they get treated and without the delays that are normal in Britain.

Rather, he reckons:

[The] major problems are somewhere between middle-income and poor. They are the ones who are not earning enough to take out an insurance policy, or not one with a high limit on medical expenditure. So if they come down with an illness which requires a long — and therefore ruinously expensive — stay in hospital, their insurance may run out and they may have to sell their homes or even go bankrupt. Those who are temporarily unemployed, between jobs, are similarly vulnerable.

The numbers are not large in relation to the whole population. We are talking about a minority of the American population — figures of 35–45 million are mentioned — which is not insured and which is not covered by Medicare or Medicaid. Of that minority only a small proportion will need fairly long-term hospital treatment. But financial disaster can happen and sometimes does. People lose their homes, their savings, everything. Half the bankruptcies in America are people who had previously been ill.

Bartholomew's ultimate conclusion seems intuitive: "In Britain the system might kill you. In America the system will keep you alive but might bankrupt you."

I agree with Mike at Cold Fury:

I have never understood, and never will understand, why those dunderheads who want to argue how much better the Canadian or British system of socialized medicine is than our own don’t just shut the fuck up and move.

And, of course, the list doesn’t begin and end with socialized medicine. Want gun control? Take off, hoser; Canada, Britain, and Australia have plenty, and the rising crime rate to prove it. Think high taxes are merely the price of civilization, and should be cheerfully paid by the winners in life’s great lottery? Don’t let the door hit you in the ass as you head out for one of the Scandinavian countries, you generous, enlightened, noble soul, you. Think that American sovereignty is far less critical to your well-being than maintaining the illusion of a strong, just, and wise council of nations as embodied by the UselessN? Go to Europe, and bask in your snobbish irrelevance. Think competition, desire for material comfort, and the pursuit of wealth are disgusting examples of the worst human failings? Cuba, China, or Vietnam has a shapeless tunic in basic bland with your name on it, baby.

There are planes, boats, buses, and trains leaving every single day, conveyances that will happily trundle you off to whatever Worker’s Paradise you think you want to live in—so why sit around here complaining for even one more moment, when for a relatively paltry sum, you can be sitting in a café in La Rive Droit commiserating with people who are as tasteful and intelligent as you are about how badly those clods you left behind are screwing things up?

Just go already. Go, and stop trying to make the last bastion of freedom and individuality on the planet into just another screwed-up nanny state. Let the rest of us sit here and suffer in our déclasse ignorance—wallowing in our unprincipled greed, wounded by the violence caused by our easy access to unnecessary deadly weapons, and eventually dying of our injuries because none of us assbackwards serfs can afford proper medical care. Of course, the House of our Spirit will be reduced to rubble almost immediately because we’ll have no access to quality public TV programming, once you Noble Few leave us to our own devices and we fail to properly support the arts.

So, Barbra, Alec, Janeane, bon voyage. You'll be back--as soon as you sneeze.

More:

Turns out the data on healthcare-caused bankruptcy in the U.S. is overstated.