Is Socialized Medicine Better?

J.J. Jackson* | January 31, 2007

Filed Under Liberals

“E” (name withheld by request) asks:

I heard some guy on Sean Hannity’s show say that America was way behind other nations who have socialized medicine in life expectancy and child mortality rate? Is this true? Is socialized medicine better than the free market health care?

Response:

Dear “E”:

I am not sure how one draws a direct correlation between how good the health care of one nation is compared to another based on these two stats. “Health Care” implies the quality of care one receives when one is sick or injured but there are many factors that affect average life expectancy of a population far beyond this one.

For example, if there is a high rate of violent crime where people die before they are able to receive “health care” (i.e. what my nurse wife refers to as DRT – Dead Right There), no matter how good the nation’s “health care system” is or how it is managed it will not matter. Also there are life style choices that can affect life expectancy as well such as what percentage of a populace smoke and develop inoperable cancer. Again, if it is “inoperable” it does not matter how good the “health care” is. You can generate a lengthy list of such conditions other than the type of health care system if you like to prove this to yourself.

Put simply there are too many variables. Then there is the issue of standard deviations and errors. You know, like when you see a poll and you say results are +/- 3%? That means that any result where one option is not outside of this margin of error is considered a “wash”.

Looking at average life expectancies I see from some data that #1 is Andora (source http://www.os-connect.com/pop/p1.asp?sort=lepop) at 83.46 years. I don’t know about their “health care” system. According to this same data the United States is #42 at 77.12 years. That is about 92% of “#1” I do know however that Canada has socialized health care and this chart lists their life expectancy in the Great White North as 79.43 years. The United States is about 97% of that in terms of life expectancy which, depending on the sample (and I highly doubt they included ever person in the country that died) can well be within a margin of error.

I think you can see the point being made here. Such a comparison is statistically flawed on so many levels.

There are other things to consider as well. Every day, for example, people flock to the United States in order to obtain surgery and medical care that they cannot get in their own countries. Heck, Fidel Castro in his communist paradise of Cuba had a doctor come in from Spain to treat him for the love of Pete! American health care and cannot suck that bad and socialized medicine cannot be so great just knowing this.

The same can be said about infant mortality. What factors are causing that rate to not be the best in the world for the United States have to be considered but rarely are in order to try and make a point which cannot be made by the simple direct comparison of statistics.

As someone who has worked with statistics on almost a daily basis I can tell you for certainty that I can make numbers say almost whatever I want them to by selective inclusion and exclusion as well as other manipulation of the sample.

This is often the tactic that those who are desperate to make a point will take. They will take a presumption, find something that they think that they can make support their presumption and then run it through what is best described as a “black box analysis” to claim they have found proof.

The problem is that in that “black box analysis” no one can reasonably say what is going on.

So is socialized medicine better? Ask yourself this. Has communism and socialism every lasted in the long run anywhere that it has been tried without either utterly collasping and leading to misserable citizenry? No it has not.

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