As this blog continues to grow, many readers have asked me to provide links for various points that I hsve made along the way. Rather than provide links to specific data, what follows is a list of the websites which, to this point, contain all the information that has gone into these diaries, and readers will probably find it more interesting to cruise through those sites rather than just see a bit of data that I used for one of my diaries. As soon as I finish reading several secondary sources, I'll also publish a bibliography of secondary works.
My intention here, incidentally, is to turn the entire blog into an e-book which will contain comprehensive footnotes, etc.
In the meantime, please see the site listing below and then take a look at a comment I append about comparisons between US health care and health care in other countries.
Virtually everything I have learned about health care in the U.S. can be gleaned from the following websites:
http://www.ahrq.gov/. The Agency for Health Research and Quality, a branch of HHS and by far the best web resource available for this topic.
http://www.census.gov/.... U.S. Census data on health insurance, based partially on the remarkable American Community Survey.
The Kaiser Foundation. A "non-partisan" resource for information about health care reform. That's their spiel. How can a health care reform organizagtion be non-partisan when the Republicans aren't interested in health care reform? But it's still a very good resource.
The Commonwealth Fund. The best of the private, health reform foundations by far.
There are a few others but those four sites will give you enough data to sound very sophisticated at any cocktail party or gallery opening. Stay away from the right-wing advocacy sites like Heritage or, much worse, the American Enterprise Institute. Yea, I know the old Mafia saying, 'keep your friends close but your enemies closer.' These aren't enemies, they're well-funded idiots.
And now a brief comment on comparisons. This blog began with a comparison between costs and outcomes of the US versus other national health systems. The data was first published by a Congressional committee in 2007 and is drawn from WHO and OECD. It is reproduced with a serious and consequential tone in every, single article about health care reform.
There's only one small problem: THE COMPARISON IS ABSURD.
Why do I say that? Because for this comparison to be at all meaningful, we would have to assume that the underlying socio-economic conditions that either gave rise to universal health care or allow it to operate at all are the same from one country to another. And they are not. Some examples of how different we are from single-payer countries:
1. Free medical education. US - No. Other countries - Yes.
2. Commercial health insurance system in existence prior to universal care. US - Yes. Other countries - No.
3. Organized, socialist-led labor movement. US - No. Other countries - Yes.
4. Medical insurance provided by private employers prior to universal care. US - Yes. Other countries - No.
Want a few more comparisons? I'll get into them when I talk in detail about the American health care consumer (coming up shortly.) In the meantime, without even talking about differences in culture, expectations, behavior, etc., it's clear that the structural differences between US and other Western societies are so profound as to make any attempt to play "follow the leader' in health care reform nothing more than a fool's errand.
But I'll drop a little hint. There is a way to reform US health care that will provide universal care and, in fact, has been successfully implemented for another essential industry. But you'll have to wait a bit. I'm still building my case.