Sunday, September 27, 2009

Health Problems Health Care Can’t Fix - WSJ.com

Health Problems Health Care Can’t Fix - WSJ.com: "Maybe President Obama has watched too much 'Sicko' because he sure likes to reiterate Michael Moore's bromides. In his joint address of Congress, he said: 'We spend one and a half times more per person on health care than any other country, but we aren't any healthier for it.'

But as Mr. Obama is fond of saying, that simply is not true.

While Americans may have a lower life expectancy than other affluent countries, the disparity is mainly due to Americans' poor personal health-care practices -- not to any flaw in health-care treatment. 'The U.S. actually does a pretty good job of identifying and treating the major diseases. The international comparisons don't show we're in dire straits,' says University of Pennsylvania's Dr. Samuel Preston, a researcher who has studied the matter.

The real problem, it turns out, is that Americans are accident-prone, health unconscious slobs. Until the mid-1980s, the U.S. had the highest per capita cigarette consumption in the developed world, and the U.S.'s obesity rate today is more than twice that of Canada and ten times that of Japan. These aren't problems of the health care system (i.e. in the diagnosis and treatment of disease). These are problems of behavior. Adjust that data for the higher U.S. incidence of homicide and obesity, and Americans actually have the highest life expectancy in the developed world.

This is the kind of inconvenient truth that the somewhat lax Mr. Moore is accustomed to overlooking. A svelte gym rat like Mr. Obama should know better"

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