It’s really just the biggest lie!

During yesterday’s health care summit, they kept repeating this lie over and over.

Minority Leader Representative John Boehner:

“We may have problems in our health care system, but we do have the best health care system in the world by far.”

Representative Joe Barton:

“… the fundamental market system that’s made the American health care system the best in the world.”

Cowardly Democrats let them get away with it.

Senator Dick Durbin:

“When I hear my friend John Boehner say that we have the best health care in the world, I don’t dispute it for a moment. If I were sick, this is the country I want to be in, with these doctors, these hospitals, and these medical professionals.”

No! It’s not!

By any objective measurement, health care in the United States isn’t even in the top ten. In the US, our health care sucks! SUCKS!

I’ve written about this before: The Sorry Performance of the U.S. Health Care System.

That article highlights the broadest measure of a health care system, overall life expectancy. We rank 37th on that list. Let’s look at a few more. (All data from the 2009 World Health Organization report)

Infant Mortality: 36rd Place – We’re just ahead of Brunei.

Maternal Mortality: All the way down to 60th place! Costa Rica and Uruguay are both significantly ahead of us. But we’re ahead of 60 or 70 other countries in the fertility rate of adolescent girls (15-19)!

41 countries have more physicians per person than the US does.

But, of course, health care REMAINS far and away … much, much more … expensive here in the US than in any other country. And, of course, we’re the only developed country totally lacking a comprehensive national health care program.

We’re certainly “outstanding” … like a train wreck is.

So … why do so many people think we have such great heath care? My theory is that we have been bamboozled by the “shiny chrome cover” syndrome. It’s also one reason it’s so expensive. Take the great Washington County here in Color Country. The biggest, most impressive building in the whole county is the hospital in St. George. Even in the second biggest population area, Hurricane, the biggest, most impressive building is the new health clinic. But “big and impressive” isn’t the same thing as “good”. Due to systemic failure, health care simply is not good in the US.

I’d be willing to admit that, in narrow specialties, we might have some of the most technically advanced physicians. And if you happen to be one of the obscenely rich Americans for whom cost is simply not a consideration anymore, you actually can get great health care here. So … OK … health care only sucks for the rest of us.

The problem starts because, as soon-to-be-former Senator Bayh said earlier this week, our political system is broken. Yesterday’s “Summit” showed that as clearly as you’re ever going to see it. For all of those politicians who have been repeatedly “selected” by our broken political system (and President Obama is one of the very few who doesn’t suffer from this defect), “honesty” is just a word you use in campaign speeches.

But just for comparison, here’s how a former political insider … who now has nothing to lose anymore … describes our health care. Tom Daschle is a former U.S. Senator from South Dakota and former U.S. Senate Majority Leader. He says this about health care:

“We don’t really have one problem in health care, we have three problems. We have a serious cost problem. We have serious access problem. The third problem we have is a quality problem. The World Health Organization when they last reviewed all the of the systems and markets in the world, listed the United States as 37th – just below Costa Rica and above Slovenia – in overall quality.”

Daschle also noted that about 26,000 people a year die because they don’t have access to health care. Daschle quoted a statistic from the Institute of Medicine that 98,000 people a year die because of medical mistakes. (Daschle was President Obama’s first pick for Health and Human Services Secretary. He withdrew when his own finances started to come under the microscope.)

We are being bled by our health care “system” like a vampire’s victim. The cost of health care insurance premiums has gone up four times faster than wages since 2000. The billions that we pay for health care is also paying for one of the greatest con-jobs in all of history.