There’s a tidbit in the update to the Hot Air post on Giuliani’s health care ad that struck me as really humorous.
Don McCanne, a senior health policy fellow at Physicians for a National Health Program, conceded that the five-year survival rate for cancer diagnoses is higher in the United States than in many countries that have single-payer systems, though the disparity is not as great as Giuliani claims in his ad.
But he said that any such comparison is flawed, since it fails to take into account the additional investment in cancer education and screening in the United States. Much of the gap would be closed if other countries invested similar sums in catching cancer early.
If all Americans had access to preventive care, screenings, and treatment — through a single-payer system or another universal healthcare plan — the five-year survival rate would almost certainly be increased, since cancers would be caught sooner.
When you look at the numbers in the study I mentioned in my last post, you’ll see how patently ridiculous this assertion really is. Let’s go back and look at those numbers.
McCanne claims that if only other countries could spend more in education and screening, they’d do as well as we would. Well, yeah! And if other countries didn’t have those humongous bureucracies chewing up the tax money that could otherwise be free to go toward screening and education, they’d be just fine.
But that’s the problem with socialized health care. There’s never enough money to go toward actual health care because so much of it is soaked up in overhead and the petty corruption that’s endemic in large government bureaucracies. You can’t simply close your eyes and wiggle your nose and make that level of waste and corruption go away. The only solution is to…well…put health care back in the hands of the people which is pretty much where it is in the United States. In other words, McCanne is making the claim that health care in those socialized nations would be better if only it were more like it is right here.
The other ridiculous thing he says is that we in America would have even higher survival rates is more Americans could get preventative care and screenings. Of course, only a universal health care system can provide that. But as we saw in my last post countries with universal health care aren’t doing all that well in the care and screenings area.
- In the United States, 85 percent of women aged 25 to 64 years have regular PAP smears, compared with 58 percent in Great Britain.
- The same is true for mammograms; in the United States, 84 percent of women aged 50 to 64 years get them regularly — a higher percentage than in Australia, Canada or New Zealand, and far higher than the 63 percent of British women.
If more American women are being screened than in countries with a universal health care system, how, exactly, is a universal health care system going to ensure that more American women get screened? It looks a lot more likely that the number of women getting screenings will go down, to match the countries that are already running socialized health care programs. And even the most vociferous socialized health care advocate, like Mr. McCanne there, would have to admit that 85 percent is an awfully high percent. Short of arresting women and forcing them into screening programs, it’s hard to see how we’re going to get our numbers much higher, socialized medicine or no.
But maybe that’s the plan.
