re: #365 kirkspencer

However I want to point out the health care cost issue as well. The care in the US is pretty good. However by every existing review we pay significantly more for less effective service. We are ‘best’ in prostate and breast cancer survivability. For life expectancy and other cancer survivorship and infant mortality and every other measure we are in the bottom half (and in most cases bottom 10%) in comparison to not only the G12 but the G20 - our notional industrial and economic peers. For this middling performance we pay at LEAST 30% more per capita counting all sources of revenue. In simple, we’re paying a lot more for goods of a lesser quality.

I’ve seen this argument many times. The problem with it is that it’s bullshit.

When computing these costs, apples are compared to oranges. The costs for countries with socialized medicine are based on whatever the government involved happens to pay out under their socialized plans. Whe costs are computed for the US, however, they include ALL medical procedures - every tummy tuck, liposuction, dick extension, boob job, botox injection, hair transplant and literally hundreds of other completely elective procedures that are not covered by any insurance plan - or by any nationalized plan (with extremely rare exceptions). This makes such comparisons worthless - the US costs are hyper-inflated by including all these elective medical procedures, while the same procedures are excluded from foreign tallies because they don’t show up on the government payout sheets, even though they may be just as widely performed.

There are additional problems with such comparisons, but this one in particular renders them completely meaningless.