From today's Wall Street Journal, in an article by Jerome Groopman, MD, and Pamela Hartzband, MD:
"The World Health Organization ranks the U.S. 37th In the world in quality. This is another frightening statistic. It is also not accurate. Yet the head of the National Committee for Quality Assurance, a powerful organization influencing both the government and private insurers in defining quality of care, has stated this as fact.
The World Health Organization ranks the U.S. No. 1 among all countries in "responsiveness." Responsiveness has two components: respect for persons (including dignity, confidentiality and autonomy of individuals and families to make decisions about their own care), and client orientation (including prompt attention, access to social support networks during care, quality of basic amenities and choice of provider). This is what Americans rightly understand as quality care and worry will be lost in the upheaval of reform. Our country's composite score fell to 37 primarily because we lack universal coverage and care is a financial burden for many citizens."
I can call a specialist doctor (orthopedic surgeon, e.g.) for a non-emergency visit, and have an appointment in a week. If I decide to have elective surgery to fix an ankle that has hurt for 12 years, the surgery will be finished within two weeks after the initial consultation. Been there, done that. That's responsiveness. If I develop a respiratory infection and am running a fever, I can almost always see my regular doctor the same day. That's responsiveness. Yes, I have good insurance. Yes, I have to pay for a portion of it every month. At 52, with a 51-year-old wife and almost-13-year-old daughter, I choose to pay $1500 per year for my portion of the insurance. But it's MY choice.
"Some people" keep harping on the fact that there are 40 million uninsured in the U.S. While true, it ignores the fact that over 18 million of them are uninsured BY CHOICE. They're primarily people in their 20s and early 30s, single workers or couples with no children, who are given the choice to not pay for medical insurance. Because they feel they're overall pretty healthy, they choose to bet on continuing health and save the money. Again, been there, done that. People in their 20s are, after all, immortal and invincible. If they get sick, they can elect to get the insurance the next year. If you are an existing employee and get sick while working for a company, the insurance company cannot deny you coverage if you sign up for it during the normal enrollment cycle.
Another statistic that's batted around to show how "substandard" health care is in the U.S. is infant mortality. Again, the people spinning the statistics ignore the fact that infants who are delivered severely premature, as early as 26 weeks gestation (full-term is 40 weeks), are considered "successful live births" in the U.S., and these infants are put into a program of horrifically expensive heroic measures to try to keep them alive. A large proportion of them don't make it, and that drives the infant mortality statistics way, way up. These infants would be viewed as late-term miscarriages in the rest of the world, and logged in a different category. Physicians in the U.S. are required by today's litigious society to treat them as "successful live births" even though they know there's not a snowball's chance in hell they'll survive the first 72 hours. What's amazing is that so many of these kids do survive to lead normal lives, thanks to the QUALITY of health care in the U.S.
The United States was founded to be a federalist representative democracy. That means that most of the actual running of the country is supposed to be handled by the states, not the federal government. If the residents of a particular state want to inflict state-government-controlled health care on themselves, then that's their right. It is not supposed to be within the purview of the federal government to foist it on the entire country.
