@TheTheologiansCafe - There are a lot of things that effect life expectancy and infant mortality that have little or nothing to do with health care access, cost or quality. That’s why I said they were kinda unlike things. But that’s true of just about any metric we can use for evaluating overall health care quality. It’s never really a completely cut and dry thing.  With regards to infant mortality, wikipedia references a study by AEI that suggests that there might be a link between infant mortality and lower average birth weights in the US than in other countries. They suggest that it might be caused by more teenage pregnancies happening in the US than elsewhere. I could see an argument likewise that it could be because mothers in the US work too much and aren’t given as much leave for pregnancy as they are in other industrialized countries. However, I highly doubt that that is enough to account for the vastly disproportionately greater amount we pay per person on Health Care.  Also, how hard people work while pregnant is not wholly independent of the health care they receive. Regular doctor visits while pregnant would increase the likelihood of a doctor detecting a problem and convincing a mother to alter their behavior. From the chart, we can see that the US also doesn’t have very many average doctor visits per person per year compared to other countries. Similarly, obesity directly effects overall life expectancy and the US scores very badly in that regard as well and although obesity is not driven primarily by quality and access to health care, it can be effected by it due to regular doctor appointments. A morbidly obese person in Japan is more likely to have a doctor tell them when their lifestyle is putting their life at risk prior to them suffering from heart disease or diabetes simply because that person is likely to have SEEN a doctor since becoming morbidly obese.There are other statistical measures that try to get a more direct idea of how the US’s healthcare relates to other countries.  The OECD for example uses a statistical measure called Years of Potential Life Lost (YPLL). It’s a measure of literally the number of years people would have lived prior to the age of 70 had they had better health care. The US also scored very poorly in this rating. We were third to last for women and 5th to last for men. That statistic specifically depends on health care being able to save those years of life so other factors not related to health care don’t effect it.  The WHO uses a metric called Healthy Life Expectancy to try and measure the years of life people live where they are fully healthy and functional and not disabled. The US ranked 24th in the world back in 2000 by that measure. Other studies just measure directly lives lost due to lack of health insurance. The Institute of Medicine found 18,000 excess deaths per year due to lack of health insurance, whereas a Harvard study found 44,800 excess deaths due to not having insurance. Those are just for not having insurance.but people die also when they have insurance but it is inadequate or because they didn’t seek medical care when needed. A 1997 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated 100,000 excess deaths occur annually in the US due to lack of medical care.All of these things are not to say that our expensive costs are directly causually related to these bad outcomes. That may or may not be the case (likely it is the case in some markets in the US due to the over-use/ over-prescription problem).  But my point is simply that the costs are way out of proportion with the outcomes. If these other countries are spending a lot more and getting better outcomes maybe we’re spending our money badly. Maybe we should spedn less on health care and instead spend it on other things, solving whatever the real problems might be to increase our outcomes. Maybe that means reducing money spent on health care and instead putting it toward paid maternity leave or more time off. Maybe it means spending it to improve access to healthy foods to combat obesity. I don’t know. But what’s clear is that the way things stand every single American pays far more than any citizen of almost any country in the world on health care and they don’t appear to be any healthier or live any longer for it. If we keep the status quo and do nothing that will continue and it is projected to get much worse.

@Rob_of_the_Sky - I consider your third group to be a subset of your second group. They’re liars. That they have a financial motivation to lie doesn’t make them any less despicable for it.@mccanarie - The nonpartisan CBO scored every single iteration of the recent round of attempted health care reform and in every single analysis they found that the reform being proposed does indeed bring down the cost of health care relative to projected costs: for the government, for individuals, AND for businesses. So I don’t see how it’s “shifting around” the costs. The bills were designed to change the incentive structures so that health care providers would focus on outcomes and quality rather than simply on financial gain. Would it have  worked? Will it work if we pass the bill eventually? Who knows. Could there have been a better plan? Maybe. You’re welcome to propose one. However, the bills proposed would have been significantly better than the status quo in terms of overall health care costs at least according to all independent or non-partisan analysis that has been done on them.But the plan was fought not on the basis of it being ineffective but on ideological grounds and fearmongering. People called it a “government takeover” even when the vast majority of the plan was as market based as similar health care reform plans proposed by Republicans when they were in office and proposed to the Clinton administration by republicans when he was in office.Any plan implemented can be revisited and improved. Doing nothing however just keeps us being screwed. I only hope that the opposition results in making the bill better but as I’ve observed the more opposition the bill gets the more they make it worse and less effective to answer the illogical criticism being brought to bare against it.@gene546 - We DO know what’s in this bill. The 2000 pages are readily available for everyone to read. It’s not “a federal program”. It’s a series of rules and regulations just like EVERY bill is. And all modern legislation is long and complex. It HAS to be. Our government is big and complex. Many would like it to be otherwise but it’s not so easy to change in one step.  But there are numerous independent analysts and journalists and scholars who have read through the legislation in depth and have summarized and explained and nitpicked over every element. We’ve been discussing this legislation for like 8 months. It’s not like there hasn’t been enough time for people to find that secret provision that will doom us all! If it were there, we’d know about it. Really I don’t remember such doomsaying about No Child Left Behind which was an equally complex set of new laws that radically changed the way education worked in the US. Yet people didn’t suggest it was a government take over of education.You’re right to be skeptical of the exaggerated claims. If people think this bill will immediately make our health care the best and cheapest in the world they’re living in a pipe dream. Anyone who suggests that to you is a liar. What it will do is start the process of curbing dangerous destructive practices like recission and denial of service due to pre-existing conditions and will likewise start realigning incentives toward quality rather than quantity or denial of care. Lastly it will result in more people being  insured and lower costs relative to what they would otehrwise have been. But overall health care costs will STILL be high. Nobody has a magic button solution that will fix health care. If they did we’d have it. We have a bad system that is going to take a long time to fix. And it’ll probably require several very long bills to fix it, but if we don’t get started then things will be much much worse.

@mccanarie - I haven’t heard anything about the parks thing. Do you have a reference for that?Much of what drives down the cost of health care according to the CBO is the estimation that expanded coverage causes less costly emergency room visits (medicaid expansion, employer and individual mandates), expanded competition causes companies to have an incentive to find ways to reduce costs (through national exchanges, the public option, allowing insurance companies to compete across state lines, and repealing the antitrust exemption of insurance companies), and switching services from private to public whenever the private systems have been proven to be more costly than public systems (eg switch ridiculously overbudget medicare advantage to regular medicare, and get more people onto medicaid, and again a public option).  There are lots of other things that reduce costs in the bills too though those are probably the big three ideas.Some things that could have reduced costs that didn’t end up in the bill were drug re-importation from Canada or repealing the law that does not allow the government to negotiate lower drug prices. These were stopped for fear it couldn’t get sufficient conservative support. Instead, Obama negotiated a deal where by Phrma “promised” to lower costs. If you’re skeptical of that promise, you’re absolutely right to be. But most of the CBO scoring was not just made up nor was it meant to serve a particular political agenda. They used standard economic practices that they’ve used for years. They are nonparisan and are constantly referenced by republicans AND democrats alike whenever their scoring provides information they feel supports their cause and then decried by both sides whenever their analysis says something they don’t want to hear. Hypocrisy like that is just business as usual in Washington though.

@gene546 - Well US national debt is a serious issue but it’s not driven by or particularly exacerbated by health care reform. Indeed the way health care reform is being designed is specifically to limit our deficit as much as possible.  The bill will cost about $750 billion, that’s true. But that amount is spread over ten years. And that’s the cost going out, but it’s not the INCOME. The bill also includes taxes and cost savings. For example we won’t be subsidizing overly expensive programs like medicare advantage in order to reduce costs. The House of Representatives version of the bill includes a tax on those who earn over $250,000 a year. The Senate version includes a tax on health care policies that are expensive and  provide too many benefits. The idea behind the latter is that it would not only help pay for the changes but also encourage health insurers to provide less over-coverage which is a driving factor in the increase in health care costs.Secondly cost savings will in theory just make the reforms cheaper overall. See my responses mccanarie about the factors in the bill that will reduce costs.The last mechanism by which the health care plan attempts to prevent this bill from massively adding to the national debt is to simply not start some of the more expensive benefits right away. So they will build up money through taxes and cost cuts first and then setup the national exchange (one of the most expensive parts of the bill) starting in 2014 (Senate) or 2013 (House).When all this is added up together what we find out is that the US will NOT be borrowing money from China to pay for this. Quite the opposite. The reforms will not only make our Health Care better but it will save the government $130 million dollars over the first ten years. And it’s projected that over the next decade the government would save even more money compared to the status quo.But your assessment of our debt to China is correct. It’s a serious problem. I don’t know if we’re sharing military technology with China in exchange, I haven’t heard that, but I do know that China has a lot of sway over our country because they hold a lot of our national debt. That said, China also is dependent on us for their exports and they don’t want the value of that debt to drop drastically since they would lose lots of money. So it’s not quite an extortion situation.As for your own personal situation, I can’t say for certain whether the reforms will help you or not. I do know that it will make it impossible for insurers to deny you coverage due to pre-existing conditions. So if your current insurance drops you, theoretically you should be able to buy insurance on the national exchange and get a decent price. But of course that assumes the bills pass in something like their current form which right now is far from certain. I hope it works out for you.

@TheModernBunny - :) Yup you’re right to blame me. Just the other day I was thinking to myself Mwahahahaha I’m gonna send my cold telepathically to Jojo so she can suffer the way I do. Actually I made my entire blog contagious so anyone who comes here might get sick, but it was also specifically targeted it toward you because I’m evil that way. ^_^Happy belated V-Day Jojo. I hope you had a good day. I wish you the best of luck in your novel. If you need any early readers or reviewers I’ll volunteer my services if you’d like.I recommend making your blog contagious. Passing off your cold to others around the world is a great way to make yourself feel better. Shared misery and all that. Hope you feel better soon.