Some while ago, when Susie and I were sitting in our favorite
café in Paris, we remarked on the large number of young couples strolling by
with baby carriages. “Hm,” I thought to
myself, “France must be experiencing a surge in births.” On the plane home, the attendant handed out
free newspapers, and I chose a copy of USA
Today [it was a Delta flight, so they had English language papers.] In it, I found a story about the declining
French birth rate. It taught me a lesson
about the uselessness of anecdotal evidence in forming an idea of a social
phenomenon.
America is a very large country, so virtually any
proposition one wishes to advance about health care can be confirmed by an
anecdote about someone’s experience. I am
sure that somewhere in this great country there is a 110 year old woman who
swears that her long life is a consequence of smoking a pack of unfiltered
cigarettes a day, drinking a fifth of whiskey daily, and never exercising. So as the Republican-controlled Congress
prepares to repeal the Affordable Care Act and set its sights on Medicare, I
thought I would assemble a few social statistics.
The average life expectancy in the United States is 79.68
years. The average life expectancy in
the United Kingdom is 80.54 years; in France it is 81.75 years, two full years
more than here. Infant mortality in the
United States is 6.2 per 1000 live births.
In the U.K., 4.8, in France 3.3, slightly more than half of what it is
in America. What do we spend for health
care? In the United States, 17.5% of GDP
[Gross Domestic Product]. The French
spend roughly 11%, the British 9%.
GDP in the U.S. last year was a tad over $18 trillion. If we could cut our expenditures on health to
the French level, that would save 6.5% of GDP, which is to say roughly $1.17
trillion each year. If we accomplished
this saving by adopting the French system of national health care, we might
also perhaps add two years to everyone’s life, on average.
Maybe I should go back to France and sit in that café.
1 comment:
I'm sure that whatever that French cafe is serving is much healthier than the garbage Americans consume, and which surely accounts for our lower health and life-expectancy outcomes.
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