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When public health care came up in days gone by, the
physicians raised the ghastly specter of socialized
medicine,
which couldn't be as good as capitalist
medicine.
Then Medicare and Medicaid came along, and doctors discovered that socialism wasn't so bad after all. In 1959, the average physician earned 390 percent as much as the average household. In 1989 with tax money flowing into medical pockets, it was 508 percent.
Since doctors did better after the government got involved, we don't hear about the horrors of socialized medicine any more.
Instead, we're supposed to be afraid of health-care
rationing.
Here's some news for our protectors in the U.S. Senate -- unlike you, with your excellent government-funded health plan which covers everything, most of us already have rationed health care. It's rationed by what we can afford, or by how much our insurance companies will pay.
Beyond that, there might be good arguments for rationing health care anyway.
It's difficult to quantify health, but there are some numbers that might help. It seems fair to assume that a country with a high life-expectancy and a low infant-mortality rate is a healthy country.
The average life-expectancy in America is 75.5, and our infant mortality rate is 10 per 1,000 live births. Some countries do worse, like Russia at 68.5 and 31, and others do better, like Canada at 77.5 and 7.3.
To compare the general health of nations, I divided life expectancy by infant mortality rate, providing a health index of 7.55 for the U.S. I then compared every country's health index to ours, which was set at 1.
By this measure, Japan's comparative health index leads the world at 2.63, followed closely by Iceland at 2.6. Many other nations exceeded America by a substantial margin --
Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, Iceland, Spain,
United Kingdom, etc. -- and they all suffer from socialized
medicine and its attendant calamity of health-care
rationing.
There's another interesting feature buried in these numbers. Most nations that exceed our health index do it with fewer physicians.
For instance, we support 1 physician per 404 people; Canadians manage to live longer and produce more live births with only one doctor per 449, while Japan is at 588 and Great Britain 611.
This indicates that there's a limit of diminishing returns on doctors. Once you exceed a certain ratio, health doesn't improve, it declines.
My rough data indicate that the turning point is somewhere between 500 and 800 -- Costa Rica, for instance, is almost as healthy we are at one per 798.
Given that, rationing appears to be the easiest way to improve American health care. Bring us down to one doctor per 600, like the advanced countries, and our life expectancy should rise as more babies survive. That would mean eliminating about 200,000 doctors, but there's no choice if we're serious about improving our health care.
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