Misusing health care statistics to call for more government involvement

Jonah Goldberg explains at National Review Online why it’s misleading to use life expectancy data to call for greater government control over American health care.

Whenever the subject of health care comes up, advocates for more government involvement insist that America’s comparatively low life expectancy is a searing indictment of our dysfunctional insurance system. Senator Bernie Sanders recently seized on Donald Trump’s statement that the Australians have a better insurance system by noting that Australians live longer, which is true. They live, on average, about three years longer than Americans.

But the gold standard of social organization for Sanders isn’t Australia. It’s Denmark. He often waxes lyrical about how Denmark has a different — and better — definition of freedom that, naturally, involves a cradle-to-grave socialist welfare state. Obviously, there’s a lot to debate there, but how does Denmark’s supposedly more enlightened approach translate in terms of life expectancy? The Danes live about a year and a half longer, on average, than Americans — or not quite as long as Australians. …

… Indeed, the chief reason American life expectancy lags — slightly — behind that of other developed countries has nothing to do with health care whatsoever. When the World Health Organization ranked America 19th out of 29 in life expectancy, Scott W. Atlas of the Hoover Institution pointed out that if you removed fatal car crashes and murders, the U.S. suddenly had the “world’s best life expectancy numbers.”

I can’t see how adopting Danish health care would affect driving habits or homicide rates. It’s also far from clear that government-provided health care does much to improve health generally. The Pine Ridge Lakota Indians already have it — in the form of the Indian Health Service. Of course, the IHS, like the Veterans Health Administration, has real problems. But a huge study of Medicaid expansion in Oregon found that, with the exception of depression diagnoses, increased health insurance yielded no significant improvement in health.