Wednesday, September 12, 2007

The wrong direction for healthcare?

With the presidential campaigns pushing universal health care back into the forefront of our collective consciousness, the industry itself has gotten into the debate. Unfortunately, it seems to have come in on the wrong side. An article from the New York Post, which appeared on the Cato Institute web page, reports that The American Cancer Society is devoting it's entire advertising budget to the promotion of government-run health care.

Unfortunately for their patients, getting their way will undoubtedly mean worse outcomes. Although free markets often create greater variation in outcomes than bureaucratically managed systems, they are also the only way to guarantee consistent quality care to the majority of customers.

The article, quoted below, elaborates.
clipped from www.cato.org
The American Cancer Society announced recently that it will spend its entire advertising budget next year
on campaigning for a government takeover of the U.S. health-care system. This is perverse: It's hard to imagine anything worse for cancer patients than government-run health care.
Cancer patients understand this. The overall five-year survival rate for all types of cancer for men in America is 66.3 percent, and 62.9 percent for women, the best outcome in the world.
free-market U.S. medicine provides the incentives that lead to innovative breakthroughs in new drugs and other medical technologies. U.S. companies have developed half of all the major new medicines introduced worldwide over the last 20 years.
Take prostate cancer, for example.
we are less likely to die from the disease. Fewer than 20 percent of American men with prostate cancer will die from it, against 57 percent of British men and nearly half of French and German men.
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