For the last two decades, critics of our largely private health care system have published paper after paper comparing U.S. health care to health care in other countries. Most of them tell the same story: the U.S. health care system costs more than any other health care system and produces the same or inferior outcomes.
In almost every case, researchers treat the data used to reach their conclusions as perfectly sound. Unfortunately, the data used to compare national health systems are generally much less than perfectly comparable. Expenditure data are calculated using different accounting systems, vital statistics are logged using different definitions and coding customs, and prices are controlled and therefore uninformative, especially in government controlled health systems.
The latest example of using dodgy data to portray the U.S. health care system as a failure comes to us via yet another study funded by the Commonwealth Fund. The claim this time is that the U.S. health care system is bad because it allows more people to succumb to “amenable mortality,” deaths that could have been prevented with “timely and effective health care services,” than health systems controlled by national governments. While the paper is an interesting academic exercise, the quality of the data used to produce its results are simply not up to the task of saying anything useful about the relative quality of medical care in different countries.
Nevertheless, recent headlines trumpeted the finding that the United States health care system performs poorly, presenting the results as unassailable fact in stories that were warmed over versions the Commonwealth Fund press release.
