Single payer health insurance is a common-sense, centrist policy throughout the rest of the industrialized world.
And the cancer rate is 5 times higher to boot.
Source?
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba649
First of all, the cancer rate certainly isn't five times higher, universally or with specific cancers, so it's disingenuous to say it's five times higher and then present a source without directly citing something backing that up. Aside from that, however, I suspect your more general point was that the cancer rate is still very high in other areas of the world that have single payer of government healthcare plans. But this still has a few caveats. (And by caveats I mean important things you leave out or dismiss that totally discredit this notion.)
"Caveat" #1: Cancer survival rates are totally random, and are, in fact, not always lower than the United States. I was doing some random googling and wiki'ing while I was waiting for my headache to (never) subside, and I came across an article from 2007 that was addressing a study done about the exact same thing you're talking about, cancer survival rates and the like.
http://www.slate.com/id/2174722/pagenum/2And it makes perfect sense. People come to the United States and our survival rates are higher because we're a wealthy country. The survival rates for certain cancers seem random, and there's nothing here that specifically makes the connection between universal and/or government healthcare itself, and the survival rates of the cancers. The NHS is poorly managed, but aside from that anomaly, there's nothing to suggest that the introduction of a government healthcare plan would do anything to lower the survival rates of cancer.
While I'm on this "Caveat" I'd like to take just a few sentences for one of the points in your source. "Fact" 10 in your article talks about how America is the center of innovation, research, and development. This again has
nothing to do with the healthcare system itself. There is, again, nothing to suggest that universal healthcare leads to less innovation, and in fact, this again has more to do with the wealth of the United States than our private healthcare system. We've been the world's only superpower for almost six decades! We're the richest nation in the world, and the center of influence and power (economically and militarily) of the world. It makes
sense that we would also be the research and development capital of the world when it comes to medical innovations. This has
nothing to do with the healthcare itself.
"Caveat" #2: The American healthcare system has a host of other problems that other healthcare systems in the world would have less of a problem in due to our nature of only covering a certain portion of the population and leaving out another.
According to two different lists on Wikipedia the US is beaten by
several countries with government healthcare systems when it comes to life expectancy. Canada (80.7), Japan (82.6), Sweden (80.9), France (80.7), Britain (79.4), etc. all beat us (78.2) when it comes to life expectancy overall!
Not to mention, we're beat out in infant mortality rates, nurses, doctors, and hospital beds per 1000 people by
several countries, the simplest graph I could find on short notice being this one.Even further, the US has 47 million uninsured people living (legally) here. I know you whined about this in a linkage spam fest in another thread, trying to introduce a number of stipulations attached to that number, but nothing you presented did such. Whether or not they're immigrants, or from certain income groups, it does nothing to knitpick away from the fact that we still have something like 16% of the population without health insurance. (Not counting those who have problems despite the fact that they're currently insured anyway.) Because of this,
it leads to about 20,000 deaths a year due to being uninsured. Covering
everyone solves or substantially cuts down on that problem.
Your characterization of the United States as having a charming healthcare system where no one has any problems and lives through any cancer isn't really that rosy. It leads out a number of important details. Summarized: Cancer rates have little to do with the healthcare system itself, and more to do with the relative wealth of the country in question. R&D happens here because we're the wealthiest and most influential country in the world, this doesn't change just by swapping some funding mechanisms. And the United States has a ton of other healthcare problems that, together, more than overcompensate our higher-than-average cancer survival rates. (Assuming private insurance has a hand in that, which it doesn't.)
PS: Also,
preventable deaths are a major problem for the United States because of a lack of basic preventable care that other nations with government plans have. We could prevent thousands of deaths each year just have having some sort of mandated preventative care.
Also, keep in mind that
the healthcare system of Britain is not entirely public and, unlike Canada, does not ban or restrict private care for the most part. A chunk of Britain's healthcare system is private, people simply choose not to use it.
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