Election years are prime seasons for heated rhetoric about the supposedly wretched state of American health care. This year follows that pattern, with the temperature likely to increase as John Kerry loses ground in the polls. Before taking the persiflage too seriously, one should look at the latest survey by the nonpartisan Center for Studying Health System Change, whose mission is empirical investigation of the accessibility and quality of health care in the United States. Here is the high-level summary its report “Trends in Americans’ Access to Needed Medical Care, 2001-2003”:
Despite sluggish economic growth and rapidly rising health care costs, Americans’ access to needed medical care improved between 2001 and 2003, especially among low-income children and adults, according to findings from the Center for Studying Health System Change’s (HSC) nationally representative Community Tracking Study Household Survey. In particular, the proportion of low-income, uninsured Americans who reported going without needed medical care fell by 3.2 percentage points to 13.2 percent in 2003, and unmet medical needs for low-income children decreased to the point where income-related differences in access to care for children have disappeared. Nonetheless, about one in seven Americans reported difficulty obtaining needed care in 2003, and people reporting access problems increasingly cited cost as a barrier to care.
When one looks at whether individuals actually get health care, instead of on the problems with particular delivery mechanisms, the situation, while not utopian, is good and improving. Even people who can’t afford many other services are able to obtain treatment when they fall ill. Meanwhile, looking at the place where so many leftists imagine the medical Utopia can be found, “Canada Looks for Ways to Fix Its Health Care System”. That judgement appeared yesterday not in some right-wing rag but in the New York Times.
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