Comments on: Why You Should Worry About the Future of Healthcare

By: Ben Murphy

Ben Murphy — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:27:00 +0000

Very well-written article, Dave! Our country’s healthcare system badly needs reform, but what is currently being proposed in Washington ain’t reform. And you accurately point out one of the biggest flaws of this plan – namely our Nation’s inability to pay for it…

Until Congress can come up with a national healthcare plan they would be willing to have themselves, we still have work to do… -B

By: Ben Martin

Ben Martin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:53:56 +0000

I, too, would take issue with the overall health of the people of US as a measure of the quality of care offered in the US. It certainly says something about the people of the US and their activities in comparison to the rest of the industrialized world, and it may say something about cost as well, but it does not necessarily have a logical connection to the quality of care available in the US healthcare industry. The fact that people from other industrialized nations come to the US for care that is either better or faster (or both) seems to me to be a pretty good endorsement of the quality of care the US has to offer. This isn’t to say that we don’t need to address the issue of cost – it is a real problem – but there is something in our existing system that has given us an extremely high quality of available care. We need to be careful not to short circuit that in the process of reform.

By: Dave Baldwin

Dave Baldwin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:41:33 +0000

Steven thanks for the comments. I can concede that the life expectancy argument could be offset by some of the factors that you mentioned. But when you look at some of the other points that “lag behind” it definitely points to the need for some sort of reform. Infant mortality in the US is consistently higher than our industrialized neighbors. Add in the fact that we spend substantially more per citizen on health care, yet out of pocket expenses in the United States are higher than other OECD countries, I think the overall conclusion is that we have a system that is at best inefficient and at worst unsustainable.

The larger issue of addressing lifestyle issues in the United States is an interesting sub debate. I would argue that a great deal of the health and disease related problems that are prevalent in the US have more to do with our lifestyle than our health care system’s ability to deal with the problems. Heart disease and diabetes are two areas that come to mind.

Thanks for reading. I hope you follow us at The Father Life regularly.

By: Steven Rushing

Steven Rushing — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:26:36 +0000

This is a well reasoned and generally fair response to the healthcare debate, which is really quite rare. I applaud you.

That being said, you did buy into one of the primary lies driving the healthcare debate: that “the overall health of the US lags behind almost every other industrialized nation on the planet”. Unfortunately this has been passed off as truth.

The statistic most often used to “prove” that we are far behind other industrialized nations is life expectancy. It is true that our life expectancy generally lags most industrialized nations by, generally, 2-4 years. But you cannot immediately leap to the conclusion that this is due to poor healthcare, or even healthcare that is not on par with our socialized neighbors.

If you subtract traffic fatalities and fatalities due to “man caused” death (murder, work accidents, soldiers dying overseas, etc) and to be fair, do the same for other socialized nations, our life expectancy actually is better than other industrialized nations.

Of course, this opens up a whole different bag of worms, as it could be argued that this shows our safety standards are subpar, we perhaps work our labor too hard, our roads are too long (our nation is big!) and too few of us ride public transportation, etc. But that is a completely different argument, unrelated to healthcare.

But that said, your article was informative and fair. =)