Health Care Is Killing Us!

David Gratzer of the Manhattan Institute declares diagnosis: nonsense to some of Obama's claims about the sickness of our health care system in the Dallas Morning News:

The high cost of health care "causes a bankruptcy in America every 30 seconds," we're told repeatedly by Barack Obama's administration. The president mentioned these exact words twice in recent weeks, before Congress and at the opening of his health care summit.

It's completely false, drawing on four-year-old bankruptcy stats and a discredited paper co-written by an advocate of socialized medicine suggesting that half of bankruptcies are due to health expenses….

Obama has said that we spend "50 percent more on health care than other industrialized nations. And yet, we don't have … better outcomes"……

This much is true: Americans live fewer years than people in Canada, Britain and France. But how long a person lives isn't simply about access to health care but reflects various factors: tobacco and alcohol use, genetics, diet, crime rates. Economist Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider observe that deaths from accidents and homicides in America are much higher than in any other developed country. Exclude these unintentional deaths from the statistics, and Americans come out on top in life expectancy. 

Michael Moynihan on the latest in supposedly high quality socialized medicine in Britain, with up to 1,200 "needless" deaths in one nightmare hospital; I wrote back in Reason magazine's July 2005 on how no amount of tinkering with health care systems from the top down can solve all our perceived health care "crises."