Does Capitalism Cure Cancer?

Yet over all, it is preposterous to argue that we have the best medical care in the world. Partly because so many Americans fall through the cracks and don’t have insurance, life expectancy is higher in most of Europe than in the United States. Even the people of Cyprus live longer than Americans, according to United Nations figures.

So argues Nicholas Kristof in a recent New York Times opinion piece.

The point is echoed time and again by liberals. American health care, they tell us, falls short on basic measures, like life expectancy. It is part of a larger argument: not only is the U.S. system expensive, it’s mediocre, bested by cheaper and more socialistic systems.

The argument sounds persuasive.

But is it? Life expectancy – like infant mortality stats, also often cited by the liberals – reflect a mosaic of factors, such as diet, marital status, drug use, and cultural values. Dismissing American health care on the basis of such statistics is like declaring Cuban democracy stronger than America’s based on voter turnout. (For a longer consideration of this issue, take a look at a em>Weekly Standard essay< I wrote a few years agospan><.)

But what would be useful to use in comparing health systems?

A better way to judge a health care system is to look at disease outcomes — how people fare after diagnosis. Generally speaking, the problem with this approach is that data can be limited; most family doctors — not to mention countries — don’t collect data on strep throat or depression.

But one disease, cancer, offers an opportunity to make a reasonable international comparison. For one thing, every Western country collects good data (mainly five-year survival rates but, increasingly, ten-year outcomes as well). And the disease is common: In its first-ever study on cancer around the world, the American Cancer Society recently reported that twelve million people around the world were diagnosed with cancer in 2007 alone.

In a lengthy essay for The New Atlantis, I continue the exercise, looking at cancer care here and there.

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the piece only looks at the response to one disease but with the focus of so many governments on cancer care, with the common nature of this illness, and with the excellent statistics available, it’s fair to use it as a proxy for health-care performance.

So how does the United States fare? Excellently.

You can read the piece here.