A conservative sees the light

[/ dave /]

qualiall_2 at yahoo.com wrote:

> >http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0309-03.htm
> >Published on Friday, March 9, 2001 in the International Herald Tribune
> >A Conservative Convert To Socialized Medicine
> >by David Burgess

The original of the article appears at the Int'l Herald Tribune site:

http://www.iht.com/articles/12871.htm

> >Why the difference? Take a deep breath. These are the numbers,
> > provided by
> >the French and British health ministries and translated into dollars
> >(bear
> >in mind that Britain and France have roughly the same populations).
> >French
> >total expenditure on health in 1999 was $109.5 billion. In Britain it
> >was
> >about $78.02 billion. Per capita, it was $1,800 in France and $1,312
> >in Britain. As a percentage of the gross domestic product, it was 8.5
> >percent
> >in France and 5.9 percent in Britain.

And in the US, it was over $4,000 per capita in 1997 (!). That's 13.6 percent
of GDP vs. 8.5 percent in France. The OECD average in 1997 was $1,747. Some
more factoids at:

http://www.cmwf.org/programs/international/ihp_1998_multicompsurvey_299.asp

"Among seven countries [Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, New
Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States] in 1996, the United States
spent the largest percentage of total health spending on physician services
and the least on pharmaceuticals... while France spent the most on
pharmaceuticals and the least on physicians."

I'm not sure if it's possible to draw any conclusions from the above, but it's
interesting nonetheless. Wait, here's part of it -

"International comparisons suggest two areas that are partially responsible
for the higher spending in the United States: hospital costs per day and
average physician incomes. The former was five times the OECD median, and
latter was two to three times larger than other industrialized countries."

Apparently New Zealand and the UK both spent 23 percent less than the per
capita median of $1,747. Is health care in New Zealand as bad as that would imply?

--

/  dave  /