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As I mentioned a few days ago, the advocates of government-run health care love to quote World Health Organization statistics. They are particularly fond of referencing “World Health Report 2000,” which purports to rank the health care systems of 191 nations.
Glen Whitman of the Cato Institute has written an excellent analysis of the methods used by the WHO to produce that report, and he concludes that it should not be taken seriously as an objective measure of how health care systems perform relative to one another:
The WHO rankings depend crucially on a number of underlying assumptions—-some of them logically incoherent, some characterized by substantial uncertainty, and some rooted in ideological beliefs and values that not everyone shares.
Among the most ideologically-loaded components of the ranking system is that which measures ”financial fairness.” The WHO defines ”fairness” in terms of how much a given government subsidizes health care, which renders single-payer arguments based on these rankings utterly meaningless:
To use the existing WHO ranking to justify more government involvement in health care … is therefore to engage in circular reasoning because the rankings are designed in a manner that favors greater government involvement.
Not that such considerations matter to single-payer advocates. I have pointed out before that these people don’t care about the integrity of their data. Contemporary “progressives” base their views less on facts than on the outward appearance of piety.
Which is why they cling desperately to the faux facts of ”World Health Report 2000.” Its pseudo-statistics provide single-payer advocates with much needed cover, allowing them to pose as thinking people whose opinions are based on actual data.
March 3rd, 2008 at 7:56 am
Incoherent facts? Like the fact that life is longer in all the countries with National (not for profit) Healthcare systems? The fact that no-one goes bankrupt simply because of Healthcare costs in those countries? Half of all bankruptcies in the U.S. are from healthcare bills. This position of trying to defend our for profit system, is simply immoral.
March 3rd, 2008 at 9:28 pm
W Horter - I see that you have memorized all your socialized medicine talking points. Life expectancy averages have little or nothing to do with the quality of a health care system. (See our essay here on this site “Myths of Single Payer Care”). This falsehood is repeated ad nauseum by the same people who believe that the health care system of Morocco is superior to that of the US and that 47 million people cannot get insurance.
What is immoral, however - is advocating that government rob Peter to pay for Paul’s medical care.
March 7th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Mr Browning, I am simply giving you the facts. The US healthcare system burns 17% of our GDP now. No other country spends more than 11% of their GDP, and remember, they are insuring everyone. For you to imply that our system is “leaner and meaner” is simply ludicrous. Our system, uses 33 cents of every dollar for administrative costs. Most other systems use less than 10%, in fact, our own government run Medicare uses less than 4% for such costs. As for life expectancy not being a “good measuring stick”, that’s almost silly. It is THE measuring stick! The real truth of this is, there is simply no argument that I know of that can support our present system against what most other countries are doing. You are trying to scare people into saying we will spend more, when in fact, we would be spending less! This is done all over the world! It’s a proven idea!