On The Deification Of French Healthcare

Great. Just when we're at the point in our Nation's history when, thanks to the two Democratic Presidential candidates, we might actually be unfortunate enough to get saddled with Socialized Medicine in the next few years, ABC has decided its time to try and re-introduce another round of deifying the French Healthcare system into the American media. Afterall, us idiots in the American proletariat might not be smart enough to, you know, buy into all this socialized bullshit, so we need to be shown just how amazingly-wonderful-awesome the French system is so that we'll be more willing to take that last step over the edge and into the abyss.

I chose the word abyss in that last sentence because, in fact, that's exactly where adopting a French-style Healthcare system would lead us to: the bottom of a very dark and scary abyss. But alas, Ms. Mary Cline, a freelance writer living in Paris, doesn't see it that way at all; which means it's time to examine her short article on French healthcare and dispel her of such bullshit notions. (Yes, we like to pretend that the people at ABC News might, actually, read this pithy blog. Just keep quite, and don't shatter our illusions of grandeur.)

The first and most obvious problem with Ms. Cline's assessment is her admiration of just how cheap, in many cases "free," visits to French hospitals and Doctors are. Sadly, this is, to an extent, true; at least for Ms. Cline. You see, Ms. Cline is not a French citizen; she's an American who just happens to be staying in Paris; which means that she doesn't really pay taxes to the French government, because she files her taxes with the IRS. Thus, while the system is "free" to her, it's really not. She is, in actuality, a leech on the backs of French taxpayers, who are financing all of her healthcare for her. If any of this sounds familiar, it should, as this is one of the biggest problems we have in the United States from illegal immigration - namely, that the illegals become leeches on all of our social services, which costs us more and more money, all while they, as undocumented workers, don't actually contribute anything to the financing of such programs.

But hey, considering we're running up deficits and that all of our big time programs are going to be going bankrupt in like 20 years, what better way to improve the American Healthcare system than to adopt a system which not only doesn't solve that problem but in fact exaggerates it?! Of course, herein lies one of the fundamental lies underlying the myth of the French system, that its money supply is somehow endless - it's not. The rising costs of this "free" and "cheap" system, are one of the reasons why France has a national debt which is some 65% of its GDP. In other words, it only seems cheap to idiots and fools like Ms. Cline, who have no understanding of how exactly it is that governments raise money to pay for such fantabulous programs.

(As a side note, its kind of funny that when talking about how wonderfully cheap French care is, she's giving the example of when she took her son in to get stitches; which, as we all know, is just a horribly expensive, outrageously difficult, and monumentally impossible procedure to do in our meek, stupid American Healthcare system.)

Then, after amusing us with anecdotes about her son's stitches experience, she regales us with some statistics which are, apparently supposed to make us bow down before the almighty behemoth of Socialized Medicine. First, she tells us that the French system is ranked number one, 36 spots ahead of the damn U.S, on the World Health Organization's list of best health care systems.

Ah, yes, because, as we all surely know by now, there is nothing on this planet as infallible as a rankings system devised by an organization that is a subdivision of the United Nations. They would never have an agenda. Nope, not the UN.

On a more serious note, it should be pointed out that the study Ms. Cline cites came out in June of 2000 (link here), so it's kind of outdated. But, more importantly, one of the primary means that it uses to measure the quality of the overall health system is how fairly the financial burden of medical care is distributed. In other words, this rankings system is inherently biased towards more socialized systems because these will, naturally, be more likely to have "progressive" (read: Marxist) mechanisms in place for income redistribution.

Next up, Ms. Cline attempts to throw around one of Socialized Healthcare supporters' favorite statistics: life expectancy. Because life expectancy is higher in France than it is in the United States, they argue, France has better healthcare. The argument, however, is false; and that is simply because other factors go into life expectancy besides just the quality of the healthcare one receives. Americans are much more likely than Frenchmen to be fat and overweight, a fact which significantly affects life expectancy, but is a result of lifestyle choices made by the individual citizens, and not their national healthcare systems. Americans have lower life expectancies because they make poorer lifestyle choices, not because they have worse healthcare.

Ms. Cline then goes on to discuss her experiences with receiving Breast Cancer treatment in both California and Paris and decides that her French experience was better. She makes this decision based on the how much more lax the French system is, mainly because they'll let her stay longer in the hospital. This conclusion presents two problems; the first is, obviously, financial (there's a $$ reason American hospitals don't like to keep patients longer than is necessary) and thus, was discussed at the top of this, now rather long, essay. However, the second problem with this conclusion is that it's based entirely on anecdotal evidence, and, thus in need of an important correction. You see, if Ms. Cline had bothered to do any real research on Breast Cancer treatment, she would have likely arrived at a different conclusion. She would have discovered that most all of the technologies and medicines that are used to treat Breast cancer were developed in none other than the American healthcare system. She would have also discovered that, despite the fact that American women are more likely to get Breast cancer than French women, they are also less likely to die from it. Meaning that, shockingly, the American system not only is able to take care of more breast cancer patients than the French system, but also more likely to cure the ones it gets.

Based on this data, the survival rate for breast cancer is 81.2% in the United States vs. 76.6% in France. (As an aside, even the raw numbers here indicate that American women are less likely to die from breast cancer (19 vs. 21.5); again, despite the fact that they are 9% more likely (101.1 vs. 91.9) to contract it - a phenomenal statistic.) Moreover, these statistics showing survival rates are even more impressive (at least for the United States) when applied across the board to all forms of cancer. Basically, the bottom line is that, while the Doctors in France may be friendlier and more accommodating, they're also less likely to keep you alive - which, in my book at least, is a hell of a lot more important than being 'happy' with the nursing staff.

Finally, Ms. Cline really gets me shaking my head when she pines about how her husband once had to wait "several hours" to be seen in a Manhattan Hospital because they couldn't track down his insurance company. This causes her to go on and assert that such a travesty would never befall one in Medical-Heaven-on-Earth, France. Indeed, she claims that

"There's no question you'll be treated in France. Everyone is."

Right, sure. Although, something tells me that the over 14,000 people who died in August 2003 in France during that fantastic heat wave would beg to differ. I mean seriously, you're bragging about this healthcare systems' ability to treat all of its potential patients when 14,000 people died on its watch, mostly from simple dehydration? Is it really that difficult to inject people with fluids and monitor them afterwards? Hell, I know how to do that, and all I have is basic training in First Aid - and I probably won't ask for you tax dollars if you come up to me and ask for help either.

Of course, there are other issues that Ms. Cline doesn't even mention in her article that I could bring up. I could talk about waiting lists, and how the elderly usually don't get seen (most of those heat wave victims were old folks), how under-skilled their Doctors are compared to ours, how our medical technology and equipment is superior to theirs, and, of course, I could go into even greater detail about the financial burdens of "free" French healthcare; but, at the end of the day, Ms. Cline makes perhaps the most eloquent argument against the French Healthcare system when, towards the end of her article, she comments on how it is "an all-encompassing cradle-to-grave system."

Indeed.

It is, ultimately, another in a long line of ill-conceived, nanny-state programs, designed to remove a populace from its own sense of personal responsibility and the often times harsh realities of life (and its finances). But by removing people from responsibility for themselves, you remove them from personal choice in matters of everyday life - afterall, how can you be trusted to make choices for yourself if you can't be held responsible for those choices? - and when those two things come together, the diminishing of both responsibility and choice, your personal rights and liberties are not far behind them on the path away from freedom.

Any system that's "all-encompassing" is simultaneously both all-knowing and, most importantly, all-controlling - and when your very health is being controlled (by a government agency, no less), you don't have near as much freedom.