Dissecting health-care data from Britain, Canada, and elsewhere

Socialized Failure

JOHN C. GOODMAN

The health-care systems of all developed countries face three unrelenting problems: rising costs, inadequate quality, and incomplete access to care. A slew of recent articles, published mainly in medical journals, suggest that the health-care systems of other countries are superior to ours on all these fronts. Yet the articles are at odds with a substantial economic literature.

What follows is a brief review of the evidence. As other writers demonstrate elsewhere in this issue, the American health-care system has plenty of problems. But it is not inferior to other developed countries’ systems — and we should therefore not be looking to these systems, most of which are characterized by heavy government intervention, for inspiration.

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