Argument: Universal health care internationally is better than US system

Support

John R. Battista, M.D. and Justine McCabe, Ph.D. “The Case For Single Payer, Universal Health Care For The United States”. Outline of Talk Given To The Association of State Green Parties, Moodus, Connecticut on June 4, 1999 – “Myth One: The United States has the best health care system in the world.

• • Fact One: The United States ranks 23rd in infant mortality, down from 12th in 1960 and 21st in 1990
  • Fact Two: The United States ranks 20th in life expectancy for women down from 1st in 1945 and 13th in 1960
  • Fact Three: The United States ranks 21st in life expectancy for men down from 1st in 1945 and 17th in 1960.
  • Fact Four: The United States ranks between 50th and 100th in immunizations depending on the immunization. Overall US is 67th, right behind Botswana
  • Fact Five: Outcome studies on a variety of diseases, such as coronary artery disease, and renal failure show the United States to rank below Canada and a wide variety of industrialized nations.”

Dan Castellaneta (American Actor and Writer, b.1958) – “America’s health care system is second only to Japan… Canada, Sweden, Great Britain, … well all of Europe. But you can thank your lucky stars we don’t live in Paraguay!”[1]

Paul Krugman, Robin Wells. “The Health Care Crisis and What to Do About It”. New York Times Review of Books. Volume 53, Number 5 · March 23, 2006 – “Single-payer and beyond. How do we know that the US health care system is highly inefficient? An important part of the evidence takes the form of international comparisons. Table 1 compares US health care with the systems of three other advanced countries. It’s clear from the table that the United States has achieved something remarkable. We spend far more on health care than other advanced countries—almost twice as much per capita as France, almost two and a half times as much as Britain. Yet we do considerably worse even than the British on basic measures of health performance, such as life expectancy and infant mortality.

[…]In summary, then, the obvious way to make the US health care system more efficient is to make it more like the systems of other advanced countries, and more like the most efficient parts of our own system. That means a shift from private insurance to public insurance, and greater government involvement in the provision of health care—if not publicly run hospitals and clinics, at least a much larger government role in creating integrated record-keeping and quality control. Such a system would probably allow individuals to purchase additional medical care, as they can in Britain (although not in Canada). But the core of the system would be government insurance—”Medicare for all,” as Ted Kennedy puts it.”

Counter-argument