The mailbox contains an angry response to one of our posts that cites widely-discredited statistics. Our correspondent writes:
Well actually the solution should include berating the insurance companies. They make enormous profit margins, far greater than many other industries. Please, we are talking about people, AMERICAN people. And if we shouldn’t berate the poor health insurance industry, than find a way to allow all Americans to have access to health care. In the wealthiest nation on earth, how can this be a difficult task?
According to the UN, we rank 37 in the world in health care quality. Costa Rica is #36, and their infant mortality rate is LOWER than ours. Their are many industrialized nations who have a significantly longer life span than Americans. I could go on with quite a few statistics that belie the fable that we have the best health care in the world, but I won’t, because the information is easily available to anyone who chooses to consider the health of the American citizen more important than corporate profits.
The health insurance companies could encourage better life styles and healthier living for their clients, but they don’t. that would cost them money, and their profit margins are huge enough for that to be unimportant to the corporate mentality.
Let’s start with the UN oft-cited health rankings. They are not, to say the very least, definitive. “The underlying data about each nation generally weren’t available,” a Wall Street Journal piece noted, so researchers “calculated the relationship between those factors and other, available numbers, such as literacy rates and income inequality. Such measures, they argued, were linked closely to health in those countries where fuller health data were available. Even though there was no way to be sure that link held in other countries, they used these literacy and income data to estimate health performance.”
The article continues:
Philip Musgrove, the editor-in-chief of the WHO report that accompanied the rankings, calls the figures that resulted from this step “so many made-up numbers,” and the result a “nonsense ranking.” Dr. Musgrove, an economist who is now deputy editor of the journal Health Affairs, says he was hired to edit the report’s text but didn’t fully understand the methodology until after the report was released. After he left the WHO, he wrote an article in 2003 for the medical journal Lancet criticizing the rankings as “meaningless.”
We simply don’t know the rankings because the data isn’t dependable. This figure that has become a talking point in some circles is simply not reliable. The UN rankings also, according to a Cato study, are defective because areas of comparison are often “based on the results they [the researchers] wish to achieve.” Tobacco control, for example is considered a factor. Car accidents are factored in, for heavens sake! The US is also criticized in the report, according to Cato, for not having a sufficiently progressive tax structure and not providing health insurance to all citizens. The goal of the UN rankings may well have been to move the US in a certain direction, therefore calling into question the accuracy of the rankings.
I’ll stick with the original statement that berating health-insurance companies, where profits are lower than in many businesses, isn’t productive and point out a logical inconsistency of my correspondent:
The health insurance companies could encourage better life styles and healthier living for their clients, but they don’t. that would cost them money, and their profit margins are huge enough for that to be unimportant to the corporate mentality.
Actually, by the lights of the correspondent’s own logic, the health insurance companies would save money by having healthier clients—it’s the unhealthy clients that cost them money. Their profit margins are better when we are healthy. I think this is thoughtless rhetoric against “the corporate mentality.” My health insurance company, by the way, encourages health-club memberships, sends a health tips newsletter, complete with low-fat recipes, and in general promotes good health.