The real question greatjustice, is that you want to go back to the health system of 1960, i pointed out that infant mortality fell from 29% to 6.9% in America. Apples and apples. Or are you going to claim that how infant mortality is measured has changed in America?
You made a big deal about increasing health costs since 1960 being a bad thing, but are you going to ignore improvements in treatment which correlate with those increased costs? Remember i cited the change in infant mortality from the same source you brought to the table.
Which, as I already mentioned had you even finished my reply, is pretty clearly not proportionate to the costs of healthcare. Unless you think a ten year life expectancy increase (A) Had nothing to do with other conditions (eg. a decline in the smoking population) and (B) was only possible through exponentially increasing healthcare costs. Which is silly, since as the second chart shows, such increasing costs did not occur in other industries where massive advances were made.
Remember when you made literally this EXACT same argument and I demonstrated that the socialist hellhole of the UK had both a cheaper and better healthcare system in the 1960s (amongst other refutations of your argument)? Good times.
Yes I do. I was asleep, and when I came back Toady himself had arrived to close the thread due to excessive personal attacks and trolling. Sound familiar?
I already know you're going to argue that 1960s America wasn't a TRUE libertarian paradise now and that three selective facts about the UK shows that our healthcare system is actually the more libertarian somehow.
It was certainly closer than any system today. It had problems relating to licensing (which had arisen in the 1910s) and some weird incentives regarding insurance (which had arisen in the 1940s), but it was close enough for the purposes of the debate.
Well, for one thing, you argued that British healthcare was cheaper, yet you only provided the assumed cost of the NHS rather than the actual cost of the NHS per household (which only begins in 1974, for some reason). It is also worth mentioning that the source I provided assumed that $3,000 was about how much one paid, period, whereas the NHS is only a portion of British healthcare costs.
For another, it DOES naturally follow that Britain and other countries would pay less for healthcare. After all,
they had a noticeably lower GDP per capita, so they had less to spend in the first place! You also mentioned that British life expectancy was higher in 1960 than in the US. This is true;
my own source puts the US life expectancy at 69.8 and the UK life expectancy at 71.1.
However, there are a couple of problems with the conclusion you draw here in terms of quality. First, the PRESENT life expectancy in the US is 78.2 whereas in the UK it is 80.1. The US is substantially closer to socialized medicine, I think you would agree, than it was in 1960, whereas the UK is roughly about as socialized as it was then. Yet despite the US moving closer in Britain's direction, the disparity
increased. Furthermore, in 1960, Britain's life expectancy was identical to Canada, despite the fact that Canada's Medicare system wasn't truly implemented until 1961 (at least on a Federal level), and it wasn't the system we have today until 1965. So clearly, there are more factors at play here than the quality of healthcare.
Now, looking over statistics, it's worth noting that America's homicide rate was (and still is)
substantially higher than in Britain. No amount of improved healthcare is going to stop homicide. Plus, America's
automobile fatality rate was pretty high, too. Britain today has
far less car accidents than the US does, and it presumably was similar in 1960, when American automobile deaths per capita were quite a bit higher (unfortunately, I can't find anything relating to British automobile deaths, though sources are welcome). Obesity in the US was also
quite a bithigher.
Costs were lower back then because dead people are cheaper than living people. But other countries with clearly more socialized systems had it cheaper than the US even back then.
Yet life expectancy increased from ~38 years in 1880 to ~52 years in 1910 (before any significant regulation at all, and when healthcare was as cheap as a couple dollars a year), and it increased from ~52 years to ~69 years from 1910 to 1960, when regulation was moderate and cost increases were not anywhere near as substantial. There is no particular evidence that incredible price increases are required for increases in life span.
If you look at citations, it's clear many other countries are every bit as inclusive of live births as America. There are some that exclude certain cases, but not all.
Okay. But then, do those countries have higher declines, or were their infant mortality rates not much higher before they implemented their healthcare systems?
Why does America have a "high rates of premature babies" according to the CDC? That isn't just a difference in reporting rates, it's a acknowledgement of having more actual premature babies. It could be due to obesity. Obese mothers are not good for baby.
...Which isn't something that a good healthcare system will be solving outright. I think we can agree that if obesity is the problem, then it won't be solved simply by implementing a universalized system.
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Topic: Calm and Cool Progressive Discussion Thread (Read 1290804 times)