The U.S. healthcare system notched another dubious honor in a new comparison of its quality to the systems of 10 other developed countries: its rank was dead last.
The new study by the Commonwealth Fund ranks the U.S. against seven wealthy European countries and Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It's a follow-up of previous surveys published in 2010, 2007, 2006 and 2004, in all of which the U.S. also ranked last.
Although the U.S. ranked in the middle of the pack on measures of effectiveness, safety and coordination of care, it ranked dead last on access and cost, by a sufficient margin to rank dead last overall. The breakdowns are in the chart above.
Conservative pundits hastened to explain away these results after the report was published. See Aaron Carroll for a gloss on the "zombie arguments" put forth against the clear evidence that the U.S. system falls short.
In the conservative Washington Examiner, for instance, Philip Klein complains that the study is "rigged to produce a result that favors socialized health care systems." He observes, accurately, that the low ranking for the U.S. results heavily from its lack of universal healthcare and thus scores low on "equity." He doesn't seem to think that's a bad thing. "It's an ideological decision to view equity as one of the most important factors in judging a health care system," he writes.
So there you have it: The principle that healthcare should be available to all is just "ideology." It doesn't matter if a huge percentage of your citizens can't get healthcare, as long as the people with access do all right.