The main reason Americans spend more on medical care is not about life expectancy - it's about two simple things: quality of life, and the trial lawyers.
(American life expectancy stats are also pulled down by the numbers of premies and babies with terrible abnormalities we attempt to save.)
First, in how many countries can you get a shoulder repair or a new knee or hip in a week? Annual screening colonoscopies and mammographies? Guys with advanced ALS on home ventilators? And how many countries generate the new treatments that the US does? (We do 90% of them. For a recent dramatic example, see this via Insty.) We all wear out and die, but there aren't many countries where my 83 year-old Mom would be playing tennis with her new shoulder, hips and knee, her synthetic mitral heart valve, her pacemaker, her cataract surgeries and her hormone replacement. She calls herself The Bionic Mom. She is willing to die, but while she is alive she wants to live: play tennis, work in her gardens, go to the ballet, sit on her volunteer boards, cook for my Dad, and go to Europe every August. What is that worth in $ terms? Of course they are on Medicare, but they would gladly buy private insurance instead.
Re the trial lawyers, where else in the world do you get a $7000 work-up if you walk into the ER with a migraine headache? Where else in the world do obstetricians pay $350,000/year in malpractice insurance because the law permits suits for bad results, not just practice errors (like amputating the wrong leg)?
If something needs fixing, it's the latter, not the former.
George Will put it this way:
The president characteristically denies that he is doing what he is doing — putting the nation on a path to an outcome he considers desirable — just as he denies any intention of running General Motors. Nevertheless, the unifying constant of his domestic policies — their connecting thread — is that they advance the Democrats’ dependency agenda. The party of government aims to make Americans more equal by making them equally dependent on government for more and more things.
That, plus power, is what it's all about. As the Cube puts it:
The main question of the day is, can Americans afford NOT to adopt socialized healthcare? Everyone knows that the individual will never take the necessary steps; it is up to the State to do it for us. In a vital decision like this, do we really need to depend on the vote of emotionally underdeveloped conservative segments? Those incapable or unwilling to acknowledge the moral superiority and the ethical progress of the more socially advanced Europeans, do not deserve a right to vote. Voting rights shall be taken away from them, as well as their medicine. One cannot expect a society to prolong the lives of its useless, degraded elements at its own peril.
I need to squeeze in here somewhere the fact that members of Congress and the government would keep their own generous private medical plans, and not be subject to government control.
