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Occasionally, articles appear comparing health care in the United States with health care in Canada or other wealthy western countries in terms of health outcomes. Yesterday, Nicholas Kristof, in an op-ed piece<\/a> in the New York Times, compared the two countries’ health care system through the filter of the experience of a 59 year-old American Attorney named Diane Tucker who moved to Vancouver in 2006. I urge you to read Kristof’s article<\/a> to get the full flavor of her contrasting recent experiences with the two health care systems. But the bottom line is that Ms. Tucker, who’s job in Canada ended, now finds herself constrained to remain there because if she came back to the United States her medical history which includes a stroke would prevent her from getting insurance in the United States at anything but a prohibitive cost. Kristof tells this story to make the larger point that Americans ought not to get scared by current health industry advertising campaigns offering horror stories about Canadian health care, and he also points out that even though America spends nearly twice as much per person on health care as Canada, the \u201cinfant mortality rate is 40 percent higher than Canada\u2019s, and American mothers are 57 percent more likely to die in childbirth than Canadian ones.\u201d He also might have added that life expectancy in Canada is now at 81, while it is only 78 for Americans.<\/a><\/font><\/font><\/p>\n At the Oxdown Gazette, Scarecrow<\/a> discusses the results of a careful Canadian study<\/a> comparing health care outcomes in Canada and the United States and after citing the study’s finding that Canadian health outcomes \u201cmay be superior . . . but differences are not consistent, Scarecrow also points out, correctly, I think, that the Canadian study focuses on patients who make it into the system only, and doesn’t take into account health care outcomes for people without insurance who do not get medical care. He then concludes that if these are taken into account, it’s pretty obvious that the Canadian system is clearly superior in \u201coverall health outcomes\u201d to the American system.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n And this brings us to the larger question. You don’t really get an unbiased comparison between the US and alternative systems, if all you do is to focus on health outcomes among patients treated in the alternative systems. To really compare health care systems, we have to view them as implementations of national policies and ask what the full impact of those policies are in terms of both health and non-health outcomes.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n Articles like Kristof’s and the very careful Canadian Study are fine as far as they go, but they look at impact in terms of aggregate costs vs. health care outcomes, while other impacts of national health care aren’t included in the discussion. Too bad, because it’s pretty clear that the fact that no one in Canada goes bankrupt, or is foreclosed upon, or loses their health care because they lose their job, is a pretty important impact of contrasting national health care policies. The fact that no Canadian business has to worry about expenses for health care also improves its competitiveness relative to US competitors. People in Canada don’t have to feel tied to a Company because it provides specific health care benefits they must have. No one has to worry about pre-existing conditions making them uninsurable. Nor do they have to worry about whether a hospital near an accident will serve them, because they have insurance that works with a hospital that’s further away.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n In short, there’s a lot more to a comparison between the US and Canadian systems than just health care outcomes and aggregate or average costs. And these other comparative impacts boil down to a favorite American idea, and that idea is \u201cfreedom.\u201d Defenders of the American private insurance system always make the case that their preferred system is about freedom of choice for the insured, and they say that a single payer system will restrict individual freedom. But when we look at the full impact of the Canadian system vs. the American system, we see that the American system is much more about the economic freedom of the insurers to become wealthier at the expense of the insured, while the Canadian system is about Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear, two of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four freedoms. It’s time that Americans had a greater amount of those freedoms, whatever the cost to those who’ve been on the health care gravy train.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Occasionally, articles appear comparing health care in the United States with health care in Canada or other wealthy western countries in terms of health outcomes. Yesterday, Nicholas Kristof, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, compared the two countries’ health care system through the filter of the experience of a 59 year-old American […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[693],"tags":[1692,1680,1681,1211,1684,1682,1685,1683],"class_list":["post-205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-1692","tag-canadian-health-care","tag-comparing-us-and-canada-health-care","tag-health-care-costs","tag-health-care-outcomes","tag-health-outcomes","tag-impact-of-health-policies","tag-oxdown-gazette"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmci.org\/alllifeisproblemsolving\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}