Ron Paul: Man of Integrity

I love when people pull out those UN infant mortality rate figures.

Of course, not every country calculates the figures the same way, and in fact, a bunch of countries, such as Canada and Germany just don't count premature babies as living children, so they don't count toward the statistic. The U.S. counts every birth.

When you quote statistics, it really pays to question the methadology of those stats.

You really think the standard of health care the average Slovenian gets is better than the standard of health care of the average American? If you decide that by UN infant mortality rates, it's true.

 

http://health.usnews.com/usnews/health/articles/060924/2healy.htm

 

The CIA Factbook just regurgitates the UN rankings.

Our infant mortality rates are the same as EVERY developed country.

From that article I just linked to:

And our life expectancy numbers have nothing to do with subpar health care, but everything to do with things like gun violence.

I am not saying "we have the market cornered on good medicine," as you put it, but we're not a failure, and in fact we are a world leader in many areas. Cancer treatment innovation, and cancer care, come to mind in particular.

This is just an anecdotal vignette, so take it for what it is worth, but I have a sibling who specializes in a very narrow area of medicine and is considered an expert on a disease that isn't rare, but isn't particularly common. There are other doctors who can treat the disease, but most of them are American. It's unbelievable how many of my siblings patients fly in from other countries that supposedly have superior health care systems, because they can't get what they need at home.

Health care is expensive. We can extend people's lives, but it has come at costs that overwhelm economies. There isn't a country managing to make coverage universal without the trade offs of high taxation (or large amounts of debt), rationing and price ceilings, which create shortages. We don't have that kind of system. It means 40 or 50 million people here have no coverage, which is unfortunate. The benefit our system has, that most of the world has sacrificed, is that we have the country that is innovating and doing research and we are responsible for most of the new medical technologies and drugs. Our standard of overall care certainly benefits from it relative to most of the world, even if that same standard of care suffers from the inequalities inherent in it being more market driven.