Much was made of America’s expensive and allegedly poor-performing health care system by the media and supporters of ObamaCare prior to the creation of the new health care law. Interestingly, America’s health care system, while deeply flawed as I’ve pointed out in the past, remains the best in the world if the issue is one of results.
For details, check out this article from Forbes which shows how, once car crashes and shootings are subtracted from the equation (can’t really relate these items to our health care system), the US has the world’s longest life spans.
Of course, America’s health care system is expensive and a lot of that spending is of dubious merit. But even government spending is a tricky measuring stick. As Jonah Goldberg notes, with 2.3 million Americans leaving the work force due to ObamaCare, not all costs associated with ANY health care system readily show up in the data.
There is no doubt that the admittedly exorbitant cost of US healthcare is primarily, if not exclusively, the result of the interference by third parties, a practice initiated and encouraged by the central government. The resultant opportunities for fraud, rent seeking, and the distortion of the doctor patient relationship are some of the obvious effects of suppression of free market operation for medical services.