| Re: Article by an economist on universal health care
The article makes some obvious errors:
Statement 1:
Infant mortality stats, for example, are unaffected by homicide rates of anyone older than, duh, an infant. Also the difference in homicide rates account for a far smaller proportion of the difference in life expectancy stats than suggested since homicides only represent a very small fraction of the causes of death in either the U.S. or Canada. By an order of magnitude, the leading causes of death are related to complications from chronic diseases. But then, the author gets his facts woefully wrong yet again, as he obviously does not even do basic fact checking: the rates of obesity are very similar in Canada as they are here, possibly only lagging by a couple years. Moreover, if you look at other industrialized countries with universal care, some, such as Germany and England even have some populations with higher rates of obesity than similar populations in the U.S. The non-healthcare reasons he cites as "excuses" for why our longevity and infant mortality are lower simply do not stand up to the facts.
Also he curiously omits or is unaware of a study which found that uninsured children in the U.S., within the same hospital, are twice as likely to die as children with similar (non-metabolic) disease, ie. trauma. Since this study only dealt with issues that have no genetic or metabolic basis, there really is no other culprit other than a problem with the health care system.
The only thing he did get right was the fact that obesity is associated with chronic disease which affects longevity. His faulty comparisons though seem to carefully avoid the obvious flaws in his argument, namely the facts.
Statement 2:
Universal health care nations typically will treat non-citizens as Micheal Moore so infamously demonstrated in his docudrama. Based on similar articles I have read that attempt to quantify speculations regarding fewer uninsured, even the most ardent skeptics of the "47 million" value can't seem to get much lower than 30 million or 10% of the U.S. population. So I am not really certain what sort of point the author is really trying to make with his second statement since it really doesn't matter if the uninsured represent 10% or 20% of the population, both estimates would represent a national disgrace.
Moreover, the health care problem goes far beyond just those who are uninsured, since many of the problems people cite about American health care arise from being underinsured. It is precisely because of these combined problems that a Harvard study found that about half of all bankrupcies are linked to being uninsured or underinsured.
Statement 3:
This is perhaps the most uninformed and convoluted reason yet. Countries such as Canada typically have a greater per capita usage of hospitals, more days therein, have more surguries than Americans, yet spend half as much as we do here. Their administrative costs for running this are 1/3 of what we pay here. Almost all countries with universal care show similar high use but far lower costs. Moreover most drug patents in the last 10 years have come from Europe and Japan, not the U.S. Very simply, our health care system is more expensive because it is inefficient and encourages waste, and increasingly, medical innovation is originating outside the U.S. The U.S. is lagging, not leading.
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Alertness is frequently muted by simple ignorance. The notion of a health care crisis is very similar to the notion of the "safety crisis" that American automobiles faced before seatbelts were mandated...it is a problem no one really notices until it is too late. | 
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