Chapter 4 of Goodman, Musgrave, and Herrick's Lives at Risk: Single-Payer National Health Insurance Around the World, entitled "Outcomes", assaults the myth that "although the United States spends more per capita on health care than countries with single-payer national health insurance, Americans do not get better health care". The authors deconstruct U.S. life expectancy and infant mortality rate data that single-payer proponents typically use, in a misleading way of course, to bash the U.S. healthcare system. The authors then cite U.S. prostate and breast cancer mortality rate data to evidence their claim that "for those diseases and injuries modern medicine can effectively treat, the country in which a patient lives makes a big difference".
The Fall 2006 book review in The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics does not reference this chapter.
The LIBERTARIAN BIOETHICS BLOGger's interest level in this chapter is remarkably low. Recitation of statistics rarely inspires me, for ideologues can easily select, in a world of ubiquitous data, numbers to "prove" nearly any assertion. A coherent, principled, logical system is what I seek; neither the current U.S. fascist healthcare system nor the single-payer healthcare systems meet that challenge.
The Fall 2006 book review in The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics does not reference this chapter.
The LIBERTARIAN BIOETHICS BLOGger's interest level in this chapter is remarkably low. Recitation of statistics rarely inspires me, for ideologues can easily select, in a world of ubiquitous data, numbers to "prove" nearly any assertion. A coherent, principled, logical system is what I seek; neither the current U.S. fascist healthcare system nor the single-payer healthcare systems meet that challenge.
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