re: #381 SixDegrees

re: #381 SixDegrees

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.

No. I’ll use OECD as my demonstration of why that is a false claim - that it’s simple denial speaking. From the OECD’s source summary:

HC.1-9;HC.R.1 Expenditure on health

Total expenditure on health is defined as the sum of expenditure on activities that – through application of medical, paramedical, and nursing knowledge and technology – has the goals of:
- Promoting health and preventing disease;
- Curing illness and reducing premature mortality;
- Caring for persons affected by chronic illness who require nursing care;
- Caring for persons with health-related impairments, disability, and handicaps who require nursing care;
- Assisting patients to die with dignity;
- Providing and administering public health;
- Providing and administering health programmes, health insurance and other funding arrangements.

With this boundary, general public safety measures such as technical standards monitoring and road safety are not considered as part of expenditure on health.
Activities such as food and hygiene control and health research and development are considered health-related, but are not included in total health expenditure. Expenditures on those items are reported separately in the chapter on health-related functions.
Health can be divided into the following functional components of health care (HC) and health care-related (HC.R) items according to the International Classification for Health Accounts (ICHA) which is presented in the OECD manual “A System of Health Accounts”

OECD tries very hard to compare apples to apples, and makes much of their source data available for verification. I invite you to demonstrate the contrary.