Paul Waldman at American Prospect (and coincidentally and indirectly, the
NYT) points out today that the only genuine beneficiaries of American private healthcare are the elderly:
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We're at or near the bottom for everyone up until you get to people in their 70s. And then our rank jumps up near the top. So an American who's 20 or 40 or 60 is more likely to die in a given year than his or her peers in any of these countries, but an American who's 70 or 80 or 90 is less likely to die than his or peers in almost all of these countries
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His explanation for this privilege of the elderly is that they have access to the only system of healthcare provision in the US which works, in terms of demonstrably better outcomes: Medicare. He concludes with some interesting questions:
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I have to wonder what people who defend the private health care system think when they see facts like these. Do they assume it's all lies, part of an international egghead conspiracy to bad-mouth America? Do they actually believe that if we can just get our health care system more privatized, then we'll find that there's some magical privatization threshold we can pass where all our problems will be solved, despite all the evidence showing that the more private a health care system is the worse it performs? I really don't know.
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Of course, here at CD, we know the answer to his question: that would be B), Paul: "it's a conspiracy!".
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