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Not so fast. You wrote "It does then compare retail consumption which shouldn't include any of these things and thus be more objective." You otherwise assumed t
by pedrocr 17y ago
Not so fast. You wrote "It does then compare retail consumption which shouldn't include any of these things and thus be more objective." You otherwise assumed that health care is largely private in the US. It's not - it's about half public. Moreover, the public spending is concentrated on the poor. So, they're getting govt healthcare and buying big screen TVs.
What I assumed and is true is that healthcare is more private in the US than in Scandinavia, which it is. So the argument still holds that if you are comparing private spending in the US that will include more healthcare than in Scandinavia. Retail spending however will not as you don't buy healthcare as a retail good.
>As someone else has posted, the "not get cancer" stuff, which isn't due to health care, overmatches what happens when you get cancer, which is when health care matters.
What makes you think "not get cancer" has nothing to do with healthcare? Two very large healthcare factors come to mind. If you die sooner from another illness you won't get cancer and if you get continuous preventive medicine you won't get as much cancer. Diet and other unrelated factors will be important as well but "not getting cancer" has a lot to do with health care.
The other flaw in the whole "cancer survival is higher so healthcare must be better" argument is that although cancer is a very important illness it is far from the only important one and not even the major cause of death. Having very good cancer survival rates could just mean that the US healthcare spends an irrational amount of resources on it, neglecting other diseases. But I don't really know.
- anamax 17y ago> What I assumed and is true is that healthcare is more private in the US than in Scandinavia, which it is. You're ignoring the fact that US poor get govt healthcare. Unless you want to argue that said govt healthcare is better than the private healthcare that the rest of us get, the US has "govt healthcare or better" and more stuff. By cohort, our poor people have govt healthcare and more stuff than yours and our richer people have better than govt healthcare and even more stuff. Which gets us to the question of how our govt and private healthcare compares to yours, because the "more stuff" conclusion seems pretty solid. > Retail spending however will not as you don't buy healthcare as a retail good. What is the basis for your claim that healthcare can not be a retail good? You may not think of healthcare as being available as a retail good, but I see it in stores and the like. I happen to received an advertisement for a "get an MRI to see anything interesting is happening inside you" service in the mail today, and that sort of thing is reasonably common. Surely you're not going to argue "necessity", as food, clothing, and shelter are both necessities and retail goods. > if you get continuous preventive medicine you won't get as much cancer Oh really? We just started to see vaccines for a common form of cervical cancer, and that was a first. How about some supporting evidence. Be precise - what types of cancer and what kind of healthcare. (Note - precancerous growths are not really pre-cancerous - they're early stage, as evidenced by the fact that the success in treating them is evaluated the same way that we evaluate other cancer treatments.) > The other flaw in the whole "cancer survival is higher so healthcare must be better" argument is that although cancer is a very important illness it is far from the only important one and not even the major cause of death. I didn't say that cancer survival rates were a decisive argument. I said that they were more relevant to the healthcare quality argument. I'd be happy to see more and better data, but see no reason to assume anything about that data before it shows up.