Kristof - Franklin Delano Obama

To add to the health care debate, New York Times' columnist Nicholas Kristof (my personal favorite columnist in the country) wrote his last column discussing at first Obama's health care proposal, but more generally the state of the American health system in the rest of the world. [You can read the column itself here].

Kristof attacks the notion that the United States has the best health care system in the world by using a different methodology than is commonly seen when comparing health car systems. For example, he uses the fact that, "Even the people of Cyprus live longer than Americans, according to United Nations figures."

I have an immeadiate qualm with this argument: to narrow the level of the health care debate to life expectancy alone is inherently flawed, and does not account for other necessary considerations. Kristof is smarter than this, and is probably just using this for a punchline, but I was still disappointed to see him do so.

Anyway - Kristof continues his piece while analyzing how the bottom (in GDP per capita) of the population receive health care. And this leads me to my question for this post - what subset of the population should be looking at in order to rank health care (or more generally other institutions) across countries? I find it necessary, though extremely unfair, to single out the bottom to make a political point. For example, Japan's GINI Index is much lower than the US's, and therefore corresponds to less income disparrity across the population. Were we to manipulate statistics in such a fashion for Japan, one could make the argument that the top 25% of Japan receive substantially worse health care services than the corrseponding percentile in the United States.

Regardless of any of this, when did we start using the bottom of the population to measure a country's success? (I'm not necessarliy saying this isn't what we should be using - just raising a question) Were we to only look at the bottom of the American public school system, it would severely distort the fact that some of the greatest universities in the world are also in the public schools (including Berkeley, UVA, and of course Michigan).

All that being said, I generally agree with Kristof and Obama on the necessary policies we must enact for an improved health care system, but more for reasons like this: "Repairing the system is thus not only a moral imperative but also an economic one. American businesses are at a competitive disadvantage when they have to pay for health care and foreign companies don’t. Among General Motors’ burdens is that it has to pay health costs equivalent to $1,500 for each car it sells."

Those are the kind of statistics that are needed in this debate, not political manipulations of stats for a cheap point. (I'm sorry Nicholas, I really am a HUGE fan).