I haven't seen the data, but I would think Canadians would be similar in that regard to Americans. But Canadian health care is so much inferior to much of Europe, not to mention the US, that it is unlikely to be an important confounding factor.

The statistical arguments against the quality of health care in the US almost without exception deliberately avoid using ACTUAL measures of health care quality, even when such data are available. They don't even attempt to control for obvious strong confounders like genetic predispositions. There is nothing wrong with the OECD computing life expectancies for various countries. However, it is extraordinarily unprofessional and ideological for them to then claim that it is even an attempted measure of health care quality.

If you want to determine the relative quality of US health care, then I recommend you look through the medical literature for treatment outcomes. Such data are not easy to find in a form to compare across national boundaries, and there is no single measure of quality, but you quickly accumulate an impression that from premature birth survival rates, to treated cancer survival, to speed of diagnosis and treatment of morbid conditions, to heart disease, that the quality of health care in the US is incomparable.

Health care is a relatively small (but much valued) contributor to health, so measures of health as proxies to health care, are sophistic devices.

What makes you think that this is true?

“Murder is a form of criminal homicide; other forms of homicide might not constitute criminal acts. These homicides are regarded as justified or excusable. … The intent of the killer usually determines whether a criminal homicide is classified as murder or Manslaughter and at what degree.
…Modern statutes generally divide criminal homicide into two broad categories: murder and manslaughter. Murder is usually further divided into the first degree, which typically involves a premeditated intent to kill, and the second degree, which typically does not involve a premeditated intent to kill. Manslaughter typically involves an unintentional killing that resulted from a person's criminal negligence or reckless disregard for human life.”

The Center for Disease Control, provide these numbers for U.S. homicides in the year 2006, the most recent year avalable at their website:

Number of deaths: 18,573
Deaths per 100,000 population: 6.2

Can you provide a link, Mr. Willis, showing homicide rates in France that will support your data?

And now that liberals and their leftist allies have control of both houses of Congress and the Executive Branch, what is their proposed solution to this terrible injustice? Their solution is to put a gun to the head of all the uninsured and FORCE them to purchase insurance, under threat of fine or jail time if they do not!

And the liberals are just fine with this solution! Oh, sure, they demand a “public option” to reduce the cost of buying this insurance-at-gunpoint, but that's just window dressing, just a sugarcoating to entice Americans to swallow this poison pill.

This approach is the essence of fascism: the pretense of private property is maintained — your money is not seized outright by the government — but the government has totalitarian power to force you to spend it as the government wants.

Obama is a power-lusting fascist with no absolutely no respect for our rights or our liberties. I wonder how many of those that voted for him understood this at the time.

September 25, 2009
Categories: Senate
Ensign receives handwritten confirmation

This doesn't happen often enough.

Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) received a handwritten note Thursday from Joint Committee on Taxation Chief of Staff Tom Barthold confirming the penalty for failing to pay the up to $1,900 fee for not buying health insurance.

Violators could be charged with a misdemeanor and could face up to a year in jail or a $25,000 penalty, Barthold wrote on JCT letterhead. He signed it “Sincerely, Thomas A. Barthold.”

The note was a follow-up to Ensign's questioning at the markup.

OBAMA-Care, anyone?

Again you show up not to do much more than throw darts, useless idiot shit.

Tell me sir, is the healthcare inefficient, or is it the government dictated payment and paperwork?

I have had three operations here in Houston in the last 20 years, all three were conducted in different hospitals by different surgeons, and all three were examples of efficiency and good results.

I am willing to bet my next months earnings that the dominant inefficiency or waste in our health care system is that which is introduced by government dictate.

But, then I am generally more willing to trust the guy I pay than the guy you vote for.

The five-year survival data for cancers is a flawed measure. We screen for cancers more than almost any other nation. (Japan, for some cancers, screens very intensely.) When you screen more, you find more cancers at an early stage. If a typical cancer kills in seven years, and we pick it up at year one, then almost everyone is alive five years later. If French physicians pick it up at year three, nearly everyone is dead five years later. Early detection only makes a difference when early treatment improves survival. That's true of some cancers, but not all cancers. In cases where it isn't true, our diligent screening added extra costs, extra years of knowing you have cancer, and no improvement in outcome.

You are offering salt and protein to Spencer when he clearly wants sugar and meringue.

Obama good,
Free markets bad.

OK, I'll buy that US life expectancy is higher than in France. But it still comes down to the point that we pay 50% to get essentially the same results.

You are defending the most wasteful and inefficient system in the world.

What the U.S. pays for its health care compared to other nations is pretty much right in line with the relationship that exists between health expenditures per capita and GDP per capita. France (for example) pays much less because that level of spending is consistent with their much lower level of GDP per capita.

Other nations, meanwhile, actively suppress the amount of their health care spending by limiting its availability (Canada, UK, etc.), which should not ever be mistaken for efficiency. Continually high capacity utilization rates for medical facilities in these countries are a confirmation of chronic underinvestment in critical resources.

What do you expect to happen to a market when:

1) Roughly 50% of all the market's participants on the purchasing side are relieved of any financial responsibility for their purchases, thereby destroying any incentive to shop for the best value for the dollars being spent or to consider the most cost-effective way of dealing with their condition — and also thereby reducing any incentive to compete among doctors and hospitals.

2) The agency — Medicare and Medicaid — that assumes the financial responsibility for this 50% has access to unlimited government funds (i.e. taxpayer dollars or government debt) and thus has no incentive to police for fraud — no incentive to care what anything costs — and no incentive to tole.

3) That same agency — though it has no actual incentive to police for fraud or to care what anything wants — is nonetheless run by power-hungry bureaucrats who, in the name of “cost control”, push off on the providers (the doctors) over 130,000 pages of Medicare rules and regulations — rules so onerous and complicated that doctors that accept Medicare patients report that they must spend at least ONE FULL DAY per week on nothing but Medicare paperwork and must employ, on average, two additional clerical assistance to help in complying with those rules.

4) Another agency, state governments, gives in to special interest lobbying and forces ALL insurance policies sold by insurance companies in that state to include benefits such as alcohol rehabilitation programs, mental health programs, maternity benefits, etc, and demands that ALL such policies are sold at the same price — which means that those that want these benefits get them primarily at the expense of those who don’t want them.

And if you think you can just buy a cheaper policy from another state — a policy that is cheaper because it doesn’t contain certain benefits you know you’ll never use — well, tough luck, because the states with these mandates generally have laws prohibiting you from purchasing from other states.

5) Another agency, the FDA, adds millions to the costs of new drugs by spending years approving drugs after drug companies have already spent years on double-blind studies proving the drugs work.

6) That same agency — which has zero experience in manufacturing and generally employs people that know nothing about manufacturing — nevertheless promulgates a vast set of regulations known as “Good Manufacturing Practices” that forces those manufacturing medical devices to create thousands of pages of written procedures, audits, etc., thereby driving up the costs of all manner of medical devices.

This massive set of regulations, in addition to driving up the costs of existing manufacturers, also constitutes a huge “barrier to entry” to any new firms that might wish to compete with existing firms, thereby reducing the competition in the field of medical device production.

7) Still yet another agency — the tort court system and the trial lawyers — forces doctors to carry malpractice insurance policies whose premiums may exceed $100, 000 a year — as well as forcing doctors to run numerous medical tests not because they think the patient needs it or has asked for it, but simply to practice what is known as “defensive medicine”.

If you think the economic effect of this tort system is small, ask yourself why the trial lawyer’s professional groups give millions in campaign contributions every election to Democrats sympathetic to the current tort rules.

Still yet another agency, the Federal Reserve, continuously inflates a fiat currency thereby guaranteeing an ongoing, constant decrease in the value of everyone’s dollars.

How, in the face of this onslaught, can you expect anything BUT rapidly rising costs?

And why on earth — in the face of all the evidence that these government interventions are economically disastrous and unsustainable — would anyone think we can put 40 million more people into the system at no additional cost?

How is more of the same poison going to make us well instead of killing us off?