Pacific Health Online

Aloha Politics
Senator McConnell, has suggested that health care in the United States is something to be proud of and that health care is these countries is flawed. Well, let’s look at some facts.
First, let's look at per capita health care spending in those three countries, and in the United States:

United States: $5,274
Canada: $2,931
United Kingdom: $2,160
New Zealand: $1,857

Let's look at the figures from a slightly different standpoint, total health care spending as a percent of GDP:

United States: 15.4%
Canada: 9.8%
New Zealand: 8.4%
United Kingdom: 8.1%

On the theory that you get what you pay for, our health care system certainly SHOULD be the best in the world? Here are the number of children, per thousand live births, who die in their first year of life in these same four countries:

United States: 6.3
Canada: 5.08
New Zealand: 4.99
United Kingdom: 4.93

Here are the years of life expectancy at birth for the total population (in all cases, the average woman lives a little longer than this, and the average man a little less than this):

Canada: 80.18 years
New Zealand: 79.62 years
United Kingdom: 78.95 years
United States: 77.71 years

Personally, I care a lot less about how many years I live than how many years I live in reasonably good health. Here are the years of heathy life expectancy in these three countries and the United States:

New Zealand: 70.3 years
Canada: 69.9 years
United Kingdom: 69.6 years
United States: 67.6 years

Here are the figures on the average man's probability of making it to age 65 in those three countries and the United States:

Canada: 82.3%
United Kingdom: 81.5%
New Zealnad: 80.9%
United States: 77.4%

But Senator McConnell is right on at least one thing. Government health care spending, as a percent of total health care spending, IS higher in those three countries than it is here. Here is the public health care spending as a percent of the total in those three countries and the United States:

United Kingdom: 83.4%
New Zealand: 77.9%
Canada: 69.9%
United States: 44.9%

This suggests to me that perhaps government is more effective at limiting costs and improving results in the health care field than is the vaunted private sector, and that increased government involvement in health care would be a good, rather than a bad, thing.

What DOES make sense is to compare the overall outcomes of one system with another, and on that basis, it is simply impossible to deny that New Zealand, Canada, and Great Britain have health care systems that deliver better results, at far lower cost, than the system we have here in the United States. ;