The Inconvenient Truth

Commentary By Ron Beasley

The Republicans have spent a great deal of time criticizing the health care systems in other countries claiming the US already has the best health care system in the world.  Of course we don't - we are number 37. Our neighbor to the north has been the target of much of that criticism and Eugene Lang and Phillip Demont set the record straight in Canada's Globe Mail, An inconvenient truth for the GOP: Canada's system is better.

But there is an inconvenient truth that the Republican ideology
cannot dispute. Canada's approach to providing citizens with universal
health insurance is superior to the U.S. model of private insurance.
When we get beyond the anti-medicare ideology and histrionics on
Capitol Hill, we can establish this by reference to four basic numbers
that give a good sense of our system versus the system in the United
States.

Life expectancy is a basic measure of the quality of health care. In
the U.S., a citizen will live 77.8 years on average. In Canada, you can
expect to live two and a half years longer (80.4 years). Infant
mortality is also a vital indicator of health care. In the United
States, 6.37 infants die out of every 1,000. In Canada the number is
5.4 out of a 1,000.

But what about the cost differences of the two approaches to health
care? Surely our Leviathan-like system, which produces such enviable
results, must cost a fortune relative to the U.S. model.

The best measure of health care costs is the percentage a country
spends relative to the size of its economy, or its gross domestic
product (GDP). Canadians spend about 10 per cent of GDP on health.
Americans spend 16 per cent to achieve inferior results on life
expectancy and infant mortality.

Finally, it is estimated that there are somewhere around 40 million
Americans � about 12 per cent of their population, well in excess of
the total population of Canada � who have no medical insurance
whatsoever. These unfortunate people are literally on their own in
paying for any and all medical treatments they require. That gap in
coverage is staggering, making the United States an outlier among all
advanced Western nations.

One might ask how many uninsured citizens exist in Canada? The
answer is zero � all Canadians are insured. In this country,
good-quality, universally accessible medical care is regarded as a
basic element of citizenship, kind of like owning a gun is in the U.S.

So to sum up. We live longer than the Americans do. We are less
likely to die at or soon after birth than the Americans are. All
Canadians have medical insurance, whereas a huge number of Americans
don't. And we pay less as a society for health care than they do in the
United States. Four numbers paint a stark picture. And when you strip
away the anti-medicare ideological rants and falsehoods on display in
Washington, Canada's approach to health insurance would probably sound
pretty good to many Americans.

By nearly every metric the Canadian system wins. Perhaps this is why most doctors support a public option and in fact many are "mad as hell" and want a single payer system - like Canada's.