‘It should have been the lead story of every newspaper in the country'

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“In December, the Los Angeles Times reported — very briefly — that from 2007 to 2008, life expectancy in the United States declined by 0.1 year. It should have been the lead story of every newspaper in the country with the largest possible headlines (‘LESS LIFE’). Did 9/11 reduce life expectancy this much? Of course not. Did World War II? Not in a visible way — American life expectancy rose during World War II. I can’t think any event in the last 100 years that made such a difference to Americans. The decline is even more newsworthy when you realize: 1. It is the continuation of trends. The yearly increase in life expectancy has been dropping for about the last 40 years. 2. Americans spend far more on health care than any other country. Meaning vast resources have been available to translate new discoveries into practice. 3. Americans spend far more on health research than any other country and should be the first to benefit from new discoveries.”

The most important graph in health-care policy

The Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation has a much prettier version of what is, to my thinking, the most important graph in health-care policy: It shows that we pay more than any other health-care system and, to add insult to injury, have ended up with more government than most of our competitors, too. It’s the worst of both worlds: a government-run health-care sector that is larger than the international norm, a private health-care sector that’s vastly larger than anything else out there and vast inefficiencies caused by the overlap and poor coordination between the two.
I’m sympathetic to the point of view that it’s worth paying a premium for choice, for decentralization, and to make sure there’s space for future innovation in health-care coverage and pricing mechanisms. None of that’s worked out very well so far, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be important in the future. That said, if you compare our health-care spending to the OECD average, you get a yearly premium of 7.9 percent of GDP, or $1.1 trillion, not to mention a larger government-funded health-care sector. I don’t think there’s any reason to believe our system is worth that sort of extra expense, do you?

The hard truth about health care: Government works