My wife and I were channel surfing the other day and we did something that we swore we would never do (again); we stopped surfing long enough to see what socialist provocateur Bill Maher was talking about. As usual, he was emitting the same kind of inflammatory propaganda that was popular in Germany circa 1939. I am not saying that Maher is an anti-Semite; I am saying that he is a foul, loathsome, offensive, and deceitful socialist.
Maher’s HBO show is a delusory diatribe that feeds the moral and intellectual worthlessness of his fellow socialists who watch it. What aroused the ire of my wife and I was his incendiary attack on the insurance industry, portraying it as a greedy institution, accumulating wealth on the backs of the suffering and the miserable. Illustrating the absurd hypocrisy of the extreme liberal, he expressed a yearning for the return of once abundant Catholic hospitals that treated the poor and the needy; Catholic hospitals that were a part of a once great institution that Maher’s style of vicious liberalism helped destroy decades ago. Indeed, wasn’t it Maher ridiculing all religions, especially Catholicism in his flop of a hateful movie, Religulous?
True to his deceptive nature, Maher offered up a false chestnut of a statistic to prove that healthcare in the U.S. needs to be socialized: "When it comes to life expectancy, the United States is ranked 50th!"
The underlying suggestion is that the U.S. healthcare system is inferior to other nations such as Canada, which is socialized. Why is the life expectancy lower? Because of infant mortality rates. And the infant mortality rates are higher in the U.S., not because we have more babies dying, but because of how most other nations calculate that particular statistic. In some countries, a severely premature infant is labeled a fetal death instead of an infant death. Not in the U.S. In many nations, if a child dies within 24 hours of birth, it is labeled a stillbirth. Not here. Social and cultural factors - including maternal drinking, drug use, and age - are key to infant mortality and have little to do with access to or quality of health care. In America, infant mortality rates are sky high (five times the national average) on Indian reservations (which have publicly financed health care by the way through the Indian Health Service) and quite low in places like Utah and Washington.
Furthermore, there are other international comparisons that are more useful. Consider five-year survival rates after a cancer diagnosis. Unlike infant mortality, which is confounded by definitional and cultural factors, cancer survival rates are a pretty good measure of the quality of a health system. These numbers aren't perfect either. They are affected by factors like the uninsured in America (25 percent of whom are illegal immigrants) who tend not to get early screening for cancer and have more advanced cases at the time of diagnosis. The data that follow are accordingly all the stronger.
The journal Lancet Oncology has reported that American cancer patients live longer than those anywhere else on the globe. Betsy McCaughey, former Lieutenant Governor of New York and a health statistics numbers cruncher, interprets the Lancet's (and other) findings as follows:
American women have a 63 percent chance of living at least five years after a cancer diagnosis, compared with 56 percent of women in Europe. For American men, the numbers are even more dramatic. Sixty-six percent of American men live five years past a diagnosis of cancer, but only 47 percent of European men do. Of cancers that affect only women, the survival rate for uterine cancer is 5 percentage points higher in the U.S. than the European average, and 14 percent higher for breast cancer. Among cancers that affect only or primarily men, survival rates for prostate cancer are 28 percent higher in the U.S., and for bladder cancer, 15 percent higher.
The British Health Service keeps costs down by rationing care through long waiting lists for service. The Manhattan Institute's Dr. David Gratzer reports that an estimated 20 percent of British lung cancer patients considered curable when they were first placed on the waiting list for chemotherapy or radiation were incurable by the time they obtained treatment.
An argument often advanced by single payer advocates is that nationalized health care leads to more preventative care. But an analysis by the Commonwealth Fund found that American women are more likely than those in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand to get regular Pap tests and mammograms. In Great Britain, men do not start getting screened for colon cancer until age 75. In the U.S. men are urged to get their first colonoscopy at 50.
As usual, Maher (like every single liberal I know) won’t let the facts get in his way. He banties about words like "reform" to describe changes that are more properly called "destruction." My wife and I are going back to surfing past Maher’s show, not because we’re close-minded, but because we’re going to insure ourselves against the intellectual euthanasia he’s pushing.
The Democrats no longer have 60 seats today. One of their number - Senator Ted Kennedy - has gone on to face his eternity. Let’s hope that God’s mercy toward him is greater than Kennedy’s toward the unborn. I take no pleasure in his passing, but maybe Divine Providence has had a hand in his timely removal from the Senate.
