New at Reason

Julian Sanchez | August 23, 2005

Kerry Howley wants to know why the U.S. won't afford her the same level of control over her own healthcare she enjoyed under a dictatorship in Burma.

Comments

|8.23.05 @ 10:38AM|#

I am not one to argue for the current US Health care system, but to me the best metric for a health system is results -- without having actual data in fromt of me, I feel confident that Burma does not compare favorably.

|8.23.05 @ 10:46AM|#

Unfortunately, you can't exactly have tabulated results without a certain level of invasive scrutiny on the health and practices of the citizenry. When you don't need to visit a government appointed gatekeeper to healthcare, how exactly does one go about collecting data for a controled study?

Funnily enough, Burma must offer it's citizenry better privacy and less government intrusion into their healthcare as well due to the lack of gatekeepers. By your standard, privacy in healthcare must also be considered unneccessary until proven neccessary by data. Shouldn't it be the other way around?

M1EK|8.23.05 @ 11:53AM|#

Oh, come on. This argues nearly as much for a national health care system as it does for deregulating prescriptions, since even if THIS prescription IS safe enough for over-the-counter, a hell of a lot of them AREN'T, and the 20 million supposed uninsured are surely in need of at least SOME of the latter variety.