What does socialized medicine really mean? Well it depends who you ask but in general it refers to “medical care that is publicly financed, government administered, or both”. In other words, it’s much like our education, fire department and police department only for health care.
Socialized medicine, which in the case of US politics is another term for universal health care, has been highly criticized by those hoping to defeat President Obama’s health care plan. Claims that it will lower the quality of services, will cost more, and will mean waiting longer for care are among the criticisms. Many are pointing to countries who have universal health care as examples of just how bad it will be. So how bad is it?
I thought I would use Maker! and some datasets from Finder! to see what these ’socialist’ health care programs look like…on a map. I took various indicators of health and health care quality from the US and compared them to other industrialized countries that do offer some form of universal health care.
The first map shows Total Health Expenditure per capita, US$ PPP. The US spends the most on healthcare at $7,290 per capita, $2,500 more than the next biggest spender.
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The next two maps show population health indicators from the OECD; Infant Mortality Rates and Potential Years of Life Lost for Males. The US, despite spending the most on health care, lags behind on both of these indicators.
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Many opponents of universal health care in the US claim that countries that do have it have to wait longer for their care. A study in 2007 by The Commonwealth Fund shows that sentiment to be inaccurate. The following maps show wait times in five countries. The countries included are Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States, and Germany. This next map shows the difference between waits for urgent care and waits for non-emergency surgery. The red circles represent the percent of sicker adults reporting a wait of 6 days or more to see the doctor when sick or in need of medical attention. The green circles represent the percent of sicker adults who experienced wait times of 4 months or more for non-emergency or elective surgery. The larger the circle, the more people who reported waits. While the US has next to the shortest waiting times for non-emergency or elective surgery, they have next to the longest waiting times for urgent medical attention.
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The last map suggests that perhaps wait times are better for those who can afford better health care and therefore are able to have non-emergency or elective surgeries. This next map, however, shows that wait times are also long for those with above average incomes in the US. In this map, the orange squares represent wait times for adults with below average income and the blue circles for above average income. Although the US does have the largest disparity between higher and lower incomes for wait times (difference between size of square and circle), people with above average incomes also have longer wait times for urgent medical attention than those with above average income in two of the four other countries. This suggests that even those who can afford good health care have longer wait times.
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While this data falls far short of telling the whole story it does point out consistently better results in health outcomes and efficiency in countries with universal health. To get an idea of how the US matches up to all countries in health care, we can look at a map of the WHO’s World Health Report Health Systems Performance Rankings where the US ranks #37.
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There are many other interesting metrics that can be mapped on this topic so check out these datasets in Finder!, or upload your own and map them in Maker!
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