International Health Comparisons

With the debate over health reform heating up, you can expect a lot of specious arguments to be thrown around. In a previous post, I tried to debunk the idea that we need health reform for reasons of international competitiveness, and I have applauded CEA Chair Christy Romer for pushing back against that "schlocky" argument.

There is another, flawed argument floating around that also needs debunking--that Americans pay more for healthcare but don't get anything for it, as measured by, for example, life expectancy. The problem with such international comparisons is that there are a lot of differences among nations beyond their health systems. To make comparisons in health outcomes, you need to control for other variables. Without such controls, the simple correlations have little meaning.

I tried to make this point in a NY Times op-ed a while back. In a recent post on his blog, Nobelist Gary Becker makes a similar argument:

the American system has sometimes been found wanting simply because life expectancies in the United States are at best no better than those in France, Sweden, Japan, Germany, and other countries that spend considerably less on health care, both absolutely and relative to their GDPs....

[However], national differences in life expectancies are a highly imperfect indicator of the effectiveness of health delivery systems.for example, life styles are important contributors to health, and the US fares poorly on many life style indicators, such as incidence of overweight and obese men, women, and teenagers. To get around such problems, some analysts compare not life expectancies but survival rates from different diseases. The US health system tends to look pretty good on these comparisons.

A study published in Lancet Oncology in 2007 calculates cancer survival rates for both men and women in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union as a whole. The study claims that the most important determinants of cancer survival are early diagnosis, early treatment, and access to the best drugs, and that the United States does very well on all three criteria. Early diagnosis helps survival, but it may also distort the comparisons of five or even ten-year survival rates. In any case, the calculated five-year survival rates are much better in the US: they are about 65% for both men and women, while they are much lower in the other countries, especially for men. These apparent advantages in cancer survival rates are large enough to be worth a lot to persons having access to the American health system.

Several measures of the quality of life also favor the US. For example, hip and knee replacements, and cataract surgery, are far more readily available in the US than in Europe.

The next time you hear someone cavalierly point to international comparisons in life expectancy as evidence against the U.S. healthcare system, you should be ready to explain how schlocky that argument really is.