Les Jones

Health Care > Arnold Kling's Health Care Bet

Advocates of socialized medicine like to note that some countries with socialized medicine spend less money per capita on healthcare than the US, and therefore concludes that those other countries are more efficient. Arnold Kling bets they're wrong. Via Marginal Revolutions.

According to those who subscribe to the myth of massive waste in health care spending, the large discrepancy in the share of GDP devoted to health care (15 percent in the United States, compared with less than 10 percent in many other developed countries) reflects the inferiority of our system. They take our higher spending level as irrefutable proof of the inefficiency of our system of private and public financing relative to a more socialized approach.

Instead, I am prepared to make the following bet: ten years from now, it will be objectively clear that the United States provided significantly better health care to its citizens between 1990 and 2005 than did other developed countries. From the vantage point of 2015, the policy blunder of the past fifteen years will not be that the United States spent too much on health care, but that other countries spent too little. The socialized systems, forced to ration health care because tax revenues are not sufficient to pay for state-of-the-art care, are constraining their citizens from being diagnosed and treated as well as Americans.

That would fit with this study that found that the US system was better at treating a sample of conditions than the socialized systems in Germany and the UK.