This morning while on the radio I got a question, as time was running out, related to the Canadian health care system.  The caller asked why I didn’t believe the Candian system to be successful when Canadians, on average, live longer and have lower infant mortality rates.

Leaving mortality rates (which are manipulated often, btw, see article here) aside for a moent, I briefly answered that statistics are difficult things.  Life expectancy, though, is decidedly not a function of the health care system.  There are hundreds of societal and cultural factors that have much greater impact on life expectancy than the health care system.  Americans drive more, for example, and auto deaths in the US are much higher than in Canada.

As this article notes, if you want to see the impact of the health care system on life expectancy, you need to look at cases where the delivery system can save/not save lives.  One important area here is cancer survival rates, which are highest in the US of all developed countries.  A US citizen, contracting cancer, has a much higher survival rate than a Canadian in the same scenario.

The sad part is that proponents of a single payer system should know that these statistics are misleading, and that health care delivery is only one of many components of life expectancy, but they continue to use the statistic  to convince the public that major reform is necessary.  This type of one sided, uncritical use of statistics needs to be examined.  If we are to seriously look at what needs to be fixed in our health care delivery systems, we need to move past misleading stats and actually examine the problems and solutions, not look for statistics that support our predetermined solutions.

And even if (and it’s not the case) the government taking over the health care system would increase life expectancy, is a small increase in the average life span worth a huge sacrifice in personal liberty?  Because remember, average life span is just that, average.  It does not mean that some individuals (the ones with liberty) don’t have shorter lives under the new system.  And the system with the greatest liberty, in the long run, will be that which produces the greatest lives.

UPDATE:  found another post today dealing with life expectancy and statistics that bears reading.   Read it here.

Scariest Hospital Risks – Page 1 – MSN Health & Fitness – Health Topics
The mistakes aren’t exactly minor, either. Between 40,000 and 100,000 people die every year because of shoddy handiwork, including surgical mishaps and drug mix-ups.

The article goes on to say that another 100,000 people die from hospital infections that were preventable.  That’s 140,000-200,000 people who die each year from seeking medical care.

In the public policy realm we often hear about the thousands (the estimate they throw out, but can’t prove is 18,000)  that die from not having health insurance.  Statistically, 85% of this 140,000 (I’ll use the low end) probably have insurance.  That’s still over 100,000 deaths to the insured from seeking medical care.  I would guess that most of this 140,000 have insurance, and that’s why they’re receiving medical care.  (If they’re not insured and receiving care, that then says the problem isn’t so big as they make it to be).

Insurance and health are not the same thing.  And 100% of people die.  And whether someone has insurance or not, they can die because they don’t seek medical care quickly enough.  It’s time to stop saying that the uninsured are more likely to die.

Non-insurance approaches like health care sharing ministries bridge the gap for many people, including people who are among our poorer citizens.  And those solutions need to be given a better look, rather than continuing in the misconception that insurance and access to care are synonymous.