Ezra Klein toots:
There’s a difference between “we have the best health-care system in the world” and “I can buy the best health care in the world.”
Absolutely goddamned right there is. The sentence that usually comes out of the mouth of someone positing the “best healthcare” trope is one about some Sultan or Prime Minister coming here for a procedure. Nobody says that our capability to perform procedures isn’t among the best or the very best in the world. What we don’t do well, if at all, is fix somebody’s high blood pressure. Or monitor their diabetes. Or screen them for colon cancer while it’s fixable. You simply cannot do those things through the Emergency Room (where the “best healthcare” folks always point out you can receive free care).
It’s precisely these little things that markedly reduce life expectancy in this country, and concomitantly increase cost as the folks who haven’t been dealt with turn up and need incredibly costly end-of-life care. This is why we pay at least twice as much as the next nearest “Western” nation while getting remarkably worse outcomes across the board.
Lemkin 