This blog has previously drawn attention to the failure of the American media to verify claims of U.S. world superiority when a little checking would show such pretensions to be untrue, or at least doubtful. Now it is the turn of conservatives opposing Democratic health care reform proposals to benefit from the media’s blind eye, with the exception of a handful of perceptive bloggers.
Among the leaders of the chauvinistic chorus has been Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who stated on NBC’s Meet the Press that “[W]e have the finest health care in the world now.” Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) went even further on Fox News Sunday, maintaining that Obama’s health plan “will be the first step in destroying the best health care system the world has ever known.” Many others are making similar claims.
Officials at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation, a policy and statistics group for 30 wealthy nations, would not necessarily agree. The latest OECD Health Data, released in July, show the United States lagging many other developed countries in key health measures, even though it is by far the largest spender on health care.
The United States spent $7,290 per capita on health in 2007, much more than any other OECD country and almost two and a half times the OECD average of $2,964, the report says. Nevertheless, the United States has fewer physicians per capita than most other OECD countries, fewer acute care hospital beds than the OECD average, and only slightly more nurses than the average.
Life expectancy in the United States was 78.1 years in 2006, almost a year below the OECD average of 79.0 years, and the U.S. infant mortality rate was significantly above the average. The United States had the second lowest proportion of smokers (after Sweden), but its adult obesity rate of 34.3 percent was the highest, followed by Mexico with 30.0 percent.
International comparisons of health care standards are notoriously tricky, and the World Health Organization gave up trying to rank world health systems in 2000, “because of the complexity of the task.” Its 2000 ranking put the United States in a clearly unrealistic 37th place, below Colombia, Morocco and Costa Rica. But top-placed France and Italy after often thought to deliver better health care than the United States.
It is a pity that the U.S. media do not seem to want to explore the nationalistic fantasies behind the conservative claims – just as they didn’t challenge President Obama’s frequent but false claim earlier this year that American workers are the most productive in the world. The New York Times published an excellent analysis entitled, World’s Best Medical Care?, but that was in August, 2007.
