Health Care Mantra

With permission, I have lifted this post in its entirety from Dave at Classical Values.  As with Dave, I am tired of the repeated meme that we pay too much for relatively poor outcomes.  Apparently those in support of government run healthcare imagine if they repeat this often enough it will mean it is true; it is not.

Health Care Mantra

Advocates of socializing health care have asked: how can America's relatively free market spend the most money on health care, yet have among the worst outcomes?

The answer is, we don't. The oft-cited WHO rankings don't really measure quality of health care, preferring to judge things like "fairness of financial contribution" and measures like life expectancy (which is more strongly correlated to lifestyle than health care) or infant mortality (other countries use different standards and so generally record more infant deaths as stillbirths than we do, perversely making their numbers better even though they sometimes let marginal infants die).

American health care is simply the best in the world, and by many measures ithe competition isn't even close:

U.S. does 2x as many transplants as OECD average

U.S. has best cancer survival rates in OECD

Death panels in Britain are putting people to death who could have recovered

Death panels: now in kids' sizes too! Infants being left to die.

U.S. has more MRIS "it was found that Canada had 4.6 MRI scanners per million population while the U.S. had 19.5 per million"

U.S. has about twice as many MRIs as OECD average

The U.S. gets new drugs 1 year sooner "On average, the FDA approval came 1 year ahead of clearance by the European Medicines Agency (EMEA)."

"Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway."

"The top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other developed country"

U.S. performs more operations than any country in the world.

Lower U.S. life expectancy does not argue U.S. has worse health care due to lifestyle factors and differences in how infant mortality is reported

Please feel free to steal, share and cite any or all of these links early and often. If anyone else has links to add, please share in the comments! Don't let them take the best care in the world away from us without a fight!