Racerism
Tuesday, December 16 2008
Dave Racer has a novel argument about what’s wrong with our health care system: it’s the immigrants.
U.S. residents have come from every nation, and our newest residents sometimes bring with them decades of health-related problems. Racial, cultural, hereditary and disease histories have a great impact on U.S. societal outcomes; this is far different from most foreign countries.
So it’s not the 46 million people who lack insurance that are the problem – it’s the 30 million foreign-born people in this country. That’s maybe 10% of the population, and not all of them from the Third World – but nonetheless, Racer argues
It is simply impossible, and quite disingenuous, to compare U.S. life expectancy, infant mortality and a host of other statistics to those of countries with homogenous populations.
Of course, that doesn’t stop him from comparing a host of other statistics to those of countries with homogeneous populations.
The rate of increase in health care spending in Canada is greater than ours, as it is in Japan and many other countries.
That’s news to me – but even if it were true, US spending exploded a long time ago. Canada has quite a ways to go before they catch up with us. Then there’s this:
Germany spends nearly 12 percent of its GDP on health care, compared with our 16 percent.
Well, actually no – the U.S. spends just under 16% of GDP and Germany just over 10%, according to this chart. Japan and the UK both spend around 8% of GDP, incidentally. Of course, that’s GDP – in real terms the US spends around $6000 per person on health care, while Germany spends half that.
Not content with financial figures, Racer brings out the really scary numbers:
More than 25,000 people a year die in the United Kingdom because of a shortage of oncologists.
Where does he get that number? Maybe the New York Times, eight years ago?
Cancer programs are so underfinanced and chaotically managed, the World Health Organization says, that 25,000 people die unnecessarily of cancer in Britain each year — people who would most likely have survived if they lived in countries with better standards of treatment, like France, Germany or the United States.
So France and Germany are about as good as the US on cancer care, despite also having government-run care. You can see how this might be inconvenient for Racer’s argument. Meanwhile, this is the same WHO that ranked the UK (and thirteen other probably-homogenous countries) ahead of the US in its 2000 Health Rankings (pdf, p. 196) according to a host of other statistics. So, in sum: we pay more, get less, but none of that matters because of the immigrants.
Clearly, Racer doesn’t give a rat’s ass about statistics or data or evidence. He’ll cherry-pick whatever he needs to get to his main idea:
And unless we know what we are buying, how much it costs, how much we have to pay out of our own pockets, and the results we can expect, we will never tame the health care beast.
So there you have it: scratch a xenophobe, find yet another free-market fantasy of health care. It’s a lot less surprising when you know his resume includes “National Campaign Manager for Alan Keyes for President in 1996″. (Hey Dave, how did that go?)
I suppose I should be grateful that Racer isn’t blaming sick people for what’s wrong with health care, but he’s wrong about immigrants and he’s wrong to pretend otherwise. We have some unique challenges in this country, but the biggest and most crucial is the massive institutional momentum of the employment-based insurance system – and that’s our own damn fault.
(via Kevin, MD)
