Sometimes markets fail

The next time some Friedman-loving disciple of free market orthodoxy starts harping on the evils of “socialized medicine” (and Mitt, I am looking at you), cram this into his cryhole:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday.

If the U.S. health care system performed as well as those of those top three countries, there would be 101,000 fewer deaths in the United States per year, according to researchers writing in the journal Health Affairs.

Preventing death seems to me a valid metric to evaluate the efficacy of a healthcare system. By that measure, the US model is more expensive and less effective than the rest of the industrialized world. Denying that fact for the sake of ideological purity condemns thousands of fellow citizens to an untimely death. That may sound a bit harsh but I don’t know how else to put it.