Health Care and Medical Care
Filed Under: Anything Peaceful
Tags: GDP • health care • Medical Care • Megan McArdle • Thomas Sowell
In the current Atlantic Megan McArdle discusses the flaws in using gross domestic product as a measurement of a country’s well-being and notes that a search is underway for alternative measures. (Actually Mark Skousen proposed one in The Freeman some years ago.) Her column contains this interesting paragraph:
One possible approach is to focus on hard indicators that we can measure in a fairly standard way. But these are scarce for some aspects of life, and even when they exist, can be tricky to interpret. Life expectancy, for example, seems pretty objective. It’s a metric on which the United States does relatively poorly, causing us endless consternation. A few years ago, however, the health-care economists Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider recalculated the numbers after controlling for deaths from homicides and traffic accidents. Because these things tend to strike very young people, they can have an outsize impact on mortality statistics. Those deaths reflect America’s crime policy and its driving habits more than the effectiveness of its health-care system. And if you remove them from the picture, say Ohsfeldt and Schneider, America jumps to the top of the life-expectancy tables.
Life-expectancy is often used to compare nations’ health-care systems, but it’s not a good measure, as McArdle points out. Thomas Sowell suggests we distinguish health care (our own efforts to take care of our health) from medical care (the services provided by doctors, nurses, and hospitals). Good idea.
