HealthBeat FYI: U.S. Health Care Far Better Than Study Claims

May 17, 2007

The U.S. health care system is the most expensive in the world, but consistently underperforms as compared to its international counterparts, according to a survey released by the Commonwealth Fund this week. Is this true?  Not according to Devon Herrick, senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA).  Herrick offered the following reaction to the Commonwealth Fund survey:  

"The Commonwealth Fund has long advocated national single-payer health care system, and this survey appears have been designed with that goal in mind.  This is a case of generating evidence to support a prior conclusion. 

"In all their criteria, the underlying supposition is that the U.S. fails because we are not a health care system funded by tax dollars (socialized medicine), where patients are insolated from the costs of care at the point of service.

"Further, by focusing on the 45 million people who are uninsured as evidence of poor access to care, they have confused the difference between lacking health insurance and lacking the access to health care.  Enrollees in Medicaid are technically insured; however, they use the same facilities and see the same doctors as do the uninsured who take advantage of our nation's charity care system. 

By comparison, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently reported that Britain's high rate of care rationing actually harms patients. The WHO report found 25,000 Britons needlessly die of cancer each year because they do not receive treatments and drugs commonly available to patients in the U.S., including charity care patients. Yet Britain's health care system was ranked number two overall by the Commonwealth Fund.

"The U.S. health care system is not perfect, but the prescription for what ails it is not gutting the whole thing and turning it over to a government-run bureaucracy, as the authors of the survey are prone to suggest."

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