US health care still tops

Some Congress members and even President Obama have been bamboozled into believing that health care is better in other developed countries than in America.

On Nov. 20, for example, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) pointed to a large blue chart showing the United States in last place in health performance. "All of these countries have much lower costs than we do," he said, "and they have higher-quality outcomes than ours."

Conrad was duped by a bag-of-tricks report from the Commonwealth Fund (Health Affairs, vol. 27, no. 1, 2008). This put America in 19th place due to our nation's large number of preventable deaths -- meaning deaths from diseases that are curable if treated soon enough.

Yet most of these deaths are caused by heart disease and circulatory diseases. The United States has a high incidence because for 50 years Americans were the heaviest smokers and now are among the most obese. Bad behavior, not bad medicine, is to blame. Our health-care system treats these diseases very effectively.

As the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded, "It seems inaccurate to attribute . . . high death rates from these causes to a poorly performing medical system."

Plus, while the Commonwealth researchers claimed to consider curable diseases of all sorts, they conspicuously omitted malignant prostate cancer -- where US care is stunningly successful. An American man diagnosed with it has a 99.3 percent chance of surviving it -- far higher than in any Western European country. It's not a death sentence here, but in Scotland only 71 percent survive, in Germany, only 85 percent.

Conrad also trotted out another "pro-reform" statistic, pointing to a "shorter [US] life expectancy compared with other industrialized countries." Again, demographers are quite clear on this: The causes of reduced US life expectancy are our higher rates of auto fatalities and violent crime, plus half a century of excessive smoking -- not bad medicine.

As the NBER concludes, "The low longevity ranking of the United States is not likely to be the result of a poor functioning health-care system."

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So libbies lie about climate change and also about US health care. They tweak studies and misreport them leaving out key info. Liberal science and studies are all a bunch of lies.