The Best Health Care System?

I saw something on last week's Meet The Press that I thought I would never see. David Gregory actually questioned the mantra that the Republicans have been repeating ad nauseum throughout this health care debate.

"MR. GREGORY: Well, but wait a minute. You, you say that we have the best health care system in the world, you say it as a matter of fact.

SEN. McCONNELL: Mm-hmm.

MR. GREGORY: But it seems to be a matter of debate. You just mentioned access. You've got 47 million people who are uninsured.

SEN. McCONNELL: Mm-hmm.

MR. GREGORY: And there are experts, including one expert who is now an Obama adviser, who actually writes about this idea that it's a myth that it's the best health care in the world.

SEN. McCONNELL: Mm-hmm.

MR. GREGORY: And this is what he wrote along with another expert last fall, saying: "It's a myth that America has the best health care in the world. The United States is number one only in one sense, the amount we shell out for health care. We have the most expensive system in the world per capita, but we lag many developed countries on virtually every health statistic you can name"; life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity, death rate from prostate cancer, heart attack recovery. That's the best system in the world?"

DG gets points from me for that question. So many times I've grumbled "best at what?" at the TV when I hear a defender of the status quo repeat that lie.

"SEN. McCONNELL: That's one expert. If you look at the surveys and ask the American people what they think, they don't think quality is a problem. They think cost is a problem and access is a problem."

If they don't think quality is a problem, why are there so many successful malpractice suits? Notice that McConnell cites surveys as the source for the facts that back up his argument. I have a clear memory of the senator during the presidential campaign saying that polls are meaningless.

"Let's look at access, the people who are uninsured that you mentioned. A better way to begin to deal with that problem is to equalize the tax treatment. Right now if you're running a business and you provide health care for your employees, it's deductible on your corporate tax return. But if you're an individual buying health care on the open market, it's not deductible to you. We ought to equalize the tax treatment. Another cost item we seriously ought to address, that the administration only pays lip service to and some of the proposals kicking around in Congress actually discourage, are these wellness efforts that we've seen on display, for example, at the Safeway company, which through their own efforts have targeted the five biggest categories of preventable disease--smoking, obesity, high cholesterol, high blood pressure and lack of exercise--and incentivized their employees to improve their personal behavior in all of those areas and capped their costs. They never mentioned junk lawsuits against doctors and hospitals. We're spending billions every year, billions in junk lawsuits defending, in defensive medicine, defending all these lawsuits. They don't want to do anything about that."

Junk lawsuits? Unfortunately DG didn't probe for the definition of junk lawsuit. If a patient sues because the wrong leg was amputated, is that a junk lawsuit?

"A 2006 follow-up to the 1999 Institute of Medicine study found that medication errors are among the most common medical mistakes, harming at least 1.5 million people every year. According to the study, 400,000 preventable drug-related injuries occur each year in hospitals, 800,000 in long-term care settings, and roughly 530,000 among Medicare recipients in outpatient clinics. The report stated that these are likely to be conservative estimates. In 2000 alone, the extra medical costs incurred by preventable drug related injuries approximated $887 million – and the study looked only at injuries sustained by Medicare recipients, a subset of clinic visitors. None of these figures take into account lost wages and productivity or other costs.^[9]"