Car analogy doesn't work with health care insurance

I am hardly surprised that John Hood didn't supply any statistics whatsoever in his column. He couldn't find them; it is just that simple. Just one salient statistic I will repeat a few times. Great Britain spends 8.3 percent of its GDP on health care while we spend 15.3 percent and gets better results. Or put more succinctly, the U.K. spends less than 55 percent as much on health care as us and gets better results.

Life expectancy in the U.K. is 79, here 77. Infant mortality in the U.K. is 5.1 percent, here 6.8 percent. An infant in our country is over 1.5 times as likely to die before age 1 than on in the U.K. Don't like the U.K., try Germany.

Germany spends 10.7 percent of its GDP on health care vs. our 15.3 percent. Germany has a life expectancy of 79 and infant mortality rate of 3.9 percent. Germany spends 70 percent of what we do and its infant mortality is 57 percent of ours. A U.S. baby is 1.74 times as likely to die before its first birthday as a German one.

I could go on and on and on. Instead I will give you one more statistic: We spend far and away the most money on health care in the entire world on a per capita basis and are, according to the CIA, number 47 in life expectancy.

So why is Mr. Hood's car analogy so wrong? Simple, if a car owner doesn't change his oil and causes his engine to cease, we don't give him a new car or repair his old one. He is on his own.

Health care doesn't work that way. If a person doesn't get routine care and needs emergency care instead he gets it and the cost gets passed on to the rest of us. So we get the worst of both worlds, we pay for a Cadillac and can't even match a Focus.

I don't expect you to just take my word for all of this, here are my links:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/etc/graphs.html

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2102rank.html

David S. Conroy

Vineyard Drive