Posted on 07/20/2008 10:27:57 AM PDT by newbie2008
In The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford highly praised the health care policies of Singapore. But it wasn't until I read the section on health care in Ghesquiere's Singapore's Success that I realized how amazing the official numbers are. If the following is true, all the comparisons showing that the U.S. greatly outspends Europe without getting better health are beside the point, because Singapore makes Europe look like the U.S.:
The Singapore government spent only 1.3 percent of GDP on healthcare in 2002, whereas the combined public and private expenditure on healthcare amounted to a low 4.3 percent of GDP. By contrast, the United States spent 14.6 percent of its GDP on healthcare that year, up from 7 percent in 1970... Yet, indicators such as infant mortality rates or years of average healthy life expectancy are slightly more favorable in Singapore than in the United States... It is true that such indicators are also related to the overall living environment and not only to healthcare spending. Nonetheless, international experts rank Singapore's healthcare system among the most successful in the world in terms of cost-effectiveness and community health results.
MOre proof that laissez-faire Capitalism works everywhere it is tried, and it works best when least diluted by Socialist tendencies.
I am encouraged by the fact that my quest for infectious disease control is mirrored by Singapore. It’s the one place with heavy government intervention, as it should be here.
Agreed. Who writes this f**king garbage, anyway?
I also have to believe that Singapore has a much better handle on who enters their country than most. If we removed all the illegals from burdening the health care system here I doubt we would even be talking about it.
Anybody wants to live in Singapore?
The biggest differences are cultural -
1. These people are mostly highly disciplined (by our standards) CHINESE. They have next to no social problems dressed up as health care issues, or social problems that turn into health care issues, like high rates of infant health problems as a result of bad habits and neglect.
2. They don’t have much of the mainly psychological hand-holding that is so much of our health care, and what there is is mainly handled by cultural practices like traditional Chinese medicine (big business there), which is not counted in health care expense accounting.
3. They have strong family structures that remove much of the continuing care costs of the elderly.
4. There is almost no malpractice or other litigation.
5. There is much less end-of-life cost escalation - it is much cheaper to die. Perhaps a lot of this is because so much of these costs are borne privately.
I bet if you looked at infant mortality and life expectancy and such for Singaporeans living in the US they’d be pretty rosy as well.
The statistical metrics that are always brought out to show how poor our healthcare system is compared to Europe are half truths.
Europe (or Singapore for that matter) doesn’t have millions of third generation brood sows on welfare. Doesn’t have cities full of homeys gunning each other down every night. Doesn’t have millions of meth heads. Doesn’t have millions of illiterate third world migrants. Doesn’t have tens of millions of morbidly obese whales who live on fried starch and sugar.
Dumb choices with health repercussions aren’t faults of healthcare providers. They can’t be fixed on the provider side.
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