Objectify This

Right here, you can witness the magic of fuzzy math. Peter Gilles of Victoria, Canada writes to Bill O’Reilly, asking, “Has anyone noticed that life expectancy in Canada under our health care system is higher than the USA?”

O’Reilly attempts to claim that this is because we are a more populous country. (He also claims that the U.S. is ten times as populous as Canada, which is not true. At last count, Canada had 33.7 million people, while the U.S. had 307 million– about nine times as many. )

However, that makes no sense– unless simply having more people in our country mean that we’re all more likely to die? He says, by way of explanation,  “that translates to ten times as many accidents, crimes, down the line.” Actually, if we had ten times as many life-threatening problems as a country that was one-tenth as populous as we are, each of us would have about the same chance of confronting them as a Canadian. This does not explain their longer life expectancy.

What does explain their longer life expectancy is that their health care system is not run with a profit motive. Unless we abandon our profit motive-based system, we’re never going to arrive at a system that actually puts patients first. A private health care industry only puts patients first when they pay to recieve the highest quality of care.

Maybe it’s time we all became a little more Canadian, eh?

Hat tip to Logan for the story.