International Socialists Help Sell ObamaCare

We’ve heard it often from President Obama and his supporters.  The World Health Organization (WHO), a division of the United Nations, ranks America’s health care #37 in the world.

And, we’re told,  all the countries that rank higher have so-called “universal health care” managed and paid for by government.

ObamaCare supporters hope we’ll assume this means patients get better care and enjoy better outcomes in 36 other countries where health care is more socialized than here in the US.  They don’t disclose the most important information, that the WHO ranking criteria are mostly about how health care is organized, financed and “distributed,”  not about quality of care, competency of physicians, success rates for treatments, or any other criteria that would actually matter.

The WHO survey is based on five weighted components:

• Health Level (weight: 25%)

• Responsiveness  (weight: 12.5%)

• Responsiveness Distribution (weight 12.5%)

• Health Distribution: (weight: 25%)

• Financial Fairness (weight 25%)

Health Level is “Disability adjusted life expectancy.” America ranks 24th.  This component blames a nation’s “health care system” for everything that affects life expectancy statistics, including substance abuse, obesity, accidents, suicide, homicide, risky sex, smoking, etc.  America is statistically worse than other nations in several of these, but that doesn’t mean there is something wrong with health insurance or hospitals or physicians.  The WHO criteria effectively blames Blue Cross when a smoker dies before his time, or a teen is murdered by a drug gang.  Researchers have found that America would rank number one in the world in this category if deaths due to accidents and homicides were factored out.

Responsiveness includes what most people would consider valid measures of health care quality: choices of doctors, speed and quality of medical services, and hospital cleanliness.  America ranks number one in the world in this component.

Responsiveness Distribution measures inequality of responsiveness.  If almost everyone in country X experiences grade D Responsiveness it will score higher than the the US where a most patients experience grade A or B responsiveness, with a few experiencing grade C.  Because WHO is driven by socialist principles, it finds inequality less tolerable than horrible health care.

Health Distribution and Financial Fairness are both about how a country’s “system” is organized and paid for.  The greater the role of government, the higher the rating in these two components.   These components do not consider the quality or availability of medical services.  WHO simply asserts that a government managed and financed “system,” especially based on steeply progressive taxation is “better.”

So here are the facts:

• Sixty Two percent of WHO’s survey weight is based on components that have nothing to do with the quality of care.  America ranks low in these components because most of our population pays for medical services privately, through private insurance plans.  If the federal government directly supervised and paid for all health care, America would earn the maximum score for these components.
  

• America scores number one in the world in the component most directly based on the quality of health care.  But that component is only 12.5% of the total survey weight.

• A country with lower quality care, with longer waiting times, with less competent physicians, and with worse medical outcomes than America, will rank higher than America in the WHO survey if  its government runs and pays for health care for all or nearly all its citizens.
  

By the same reasoning WHO would conclude that groceries purchased with food stamps were “better” than groceries purchased with one’s own money.

By the same reasoning WHO would rate the French military “better” than the American military, because the tax system that pays for it is more steeply progressive.

When Obama and the government-media complex team up with the international socialists who run the UN and it’s World Health Organization to cite America’s rank of 37 they are attempting to sell ObamaCare with yet another deception.