5 ms·
You're cherry picking. You've presented one stat where the US system comes out well ahead of the UK system (which is far from the only socialized health care sy
by wk_end 10y ago
You're cherry picking. You've presented one stat where the US system comes out well ahead of the UK system (which is far from the only socialized health care system). But so what? It's true that the American health care system is not literally the worst at everything. But yes, when all is said and done, if you look at the data in aggregate [0], socialized medicine provides far more bang for the buck than the American system does.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_quality_of_healthcare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_quality_o...
The US usually does quite well: often times somewhat better than some countries with socialized health care, usually somewhat worse than some others; it's rare that there's a dramatic difference between it and other first world countries. But, of course, where there is a dramatic difference is in costs: the US often spends twice as much per capita [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
Moreover, the way those costs are distributed is socially destructive in the US in a way that they simply aren't in any other country. No one in Canada goes bankrupt due to medical bills; in the US, roughly 2 million people do a year, and another 56 million struggle to pay their bills [2].
[2] http://www.cnbc.com/id/100840148 http://www.cnbc.com/id/100840148
And again, all this is for what is, in aggregate, roughly the same quality of care.
- CWuestefeld 10y agoin the US, roughly 2 million people do [bankrupt due to medical bills] a year, and another 56 million struggle to pay their bills This is misinterpreting the data. The vast majority of this is the problems caused by lost income - an inability to work while ill, not because of the medical bills themselves. EDIT: remove repeated phrase
- wk_end 10y agoThe press release for the original study this article is based on claims they've accounted for this: "NerdWallet Health chose to include only bankruptcy explicitly tied to medical bills, excluding indirect reasons like lost work opportunities." [0] https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/health/managing-medical-bills/nerdwallet-health-study-estimates-56-million-americans-65-struggle-medical-bills-2013/ https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/health/managing-medical-bill...
- CWuestefeld 10y agoI guess I should knuckle down and look at the survey methodology to see for sure. But given my time constraints, I'll just note that while I acknowledge the ambiguity, I read that statement as closer to "we don't count people that missed out on a better job or promotion" (emphasizing the word "opportunity", I guess), rather than saying "we discounted all foregone income".
- yummyfajitas 10y agoThe study cited by your CNBC article is simply flawed and doesn't measure what innumerate reporters think it measures. To measure the number of bankruptcies due to medical causes, you compute P(bankruptcy|medical cause) - P(bankruptcy|no medical cause). The study measures P(medical cause|bankruptcy). Here, "medical cause" = "spent $1001 or more on medicine out of pocket". The classic example of a medical bankruptcy is Michael Vick, the NFL quarterback who went bankrupt after going to jail for dogfighting (due I'm sure to his medical bills). See also McCardle's deeper debunking of it: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/06/elizabeth-warren-and-the-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-utterly-misleading-bankruptcy-study/18826/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/06/elizabet...
- wk_end 10y agoThe study cited by that CNBC article is not the PNHP study criticized by McCardle [0], although its bankruptcy numbers are derived from it (it also uses numbers from the CDC and the Commonwealth Fund). I encourage you take a look at the original press release [1] (also linked to in the CNBC article), which has any number of other damning statistics besides the bankruptcy numbers that you and McCardle take issue with. Without getting into it here, I don't think McCardle's "debunking" is very persuasive, but you're right that the PNHP study (and thus at least the bankruptcy numbers in the NerdWallet Health report) has serious problems; I hadn't read it, and just as you point out, the PNHP authors conflate numbers to get them as high as possible: around 62%, whereas "when asked about problems that contributed very much or somewhat to their bankruptcy [...] 54.9% cited medical or drug costs". But while 54.9% is lower, it's...not a whole lot lower. Even if the numbers were halved, say, by taking the 29% of people who wholly attributed their bankruptcy to their own medical bills (not their family's), that's nowhere near an order of magnitude different: a million people going through bankruptcy due to medical bills is better than two million but is just as disgraceful, and simply not going to happen in countries with socialized medicine...so I think my original point still stands. [0] http://www.pnhp.org/new_bankruptcy_study/Bankruptcy-2009.pdf http://www.pnhp.org/new_bankruptcy_study/Bankruptcy-2009.pdf [1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/health/managing-medical-bills/nerdwallet-health-study-estimates-56-million-americans-65-struggle-medical-bills-2013/ https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/health/managing-medical-bill...