Over on Cato, there’s an article
presenting one example highlighting the difference in the U.S. private
health care system versus the nationalized health care offered in most other
industrialized nations. As you might expect, the Cato article supports a
private, free-market based health care system.
In most countries with national health insurance, the
preferred treatment for prostate cancer is … to do nothing.Prostate cancer is a slow-moving disease. Most patients are older and
will live several years after diagnosis. So it is not cost-effective under
socialized medicine to treat the disease too aggressively. This saves money,
but at a more human cost.Though American men are more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer
than their counterparts in other countries, we are less likely to die from
the disease. Less than 1 in 5 American men with prostate cancer will die
from it, but 57 percent of British men and nearly half of French and German
men will. Even in Canada, a quarter of men diagnosed with prostate cancer
die from the disease.
While I’m not sure that I agree completely with the author’s thesis, the
article does do a good job highlighting some of the points that ought to be
raised in a public debate on health care. Is the rationing of care or
establishment of a two-tiered public/private health care system, and the
resultant human toll of such a system, worth the expense and bureaucracy
that would arise if universal health insurance were extended in the U.S?