Scott Atlas on American Health Care

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 30 July 2012

⏱️ 62 minutes

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Summary

Scott Atlas, Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and author of In Excellent Health, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the U.S. health care system. Atlas argues that the U.S. health care system is top-notch relative to other countries and that data that show otherwise rely on including factors unrelated to health care or on spurious definitions. For example, life expectancy in the United States is unexceptional. When you take out suicides and fatal car accidents, factors that Atlas argues are unrelated to the health care system, the United States has the longest life expectancy in the world. A similar change occurs when measuring infant mortality--foreign data do not include as many at-risk births as in the United States and the measure of a birth is not comparable. In a number of other areas including cancer survival rates, access to hip replacement surgery and waiting times to see a physician, Atlas argues that the United States is also at or near the top. The discussion concludes with a discussion of access to health care for the poor and the failure of Medicaid.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you.
0:36.7	Today is July 24, 2012, and my guest is Scott Atlus, the David and Joan Tradol senior fellow
0:45.6	at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. His latest book is in excellent health, setting
0:51.8	the record straight on America's healthcare. Scott, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:55.0	Thanks for having me.
0:56.6	When you combine the public and private expenditures for healthcare in the United States, you get
1:00.8	a pretty big number. That in itself tells you nothing about the effectiveness of US healthcare.
1:06.7	It might be a good thing. It might be a bad thing. But you often hear that the US spends more
1:11.1	and actually gets less for its money than other systems that US healthcare outcomes are
1:16.3	terrible relative to the rest of the world. So ignoring the expenditure side, at least
1:20.6	for the moment, is it true that US healthcare outcomes are mediocre relative to the rest
1:25.2	of the world?
1:26.2	Well, I think this is really one of the biggest problems about misinformation that the
1:33.6	public has been hearing. The quality of US healthcare compared to the rest of the world
1:38.5	is actually far superior in almost all chronic diseases, almost all treatments, almost
1:45.4	all cancers, screening, access to tests, access to new treatments. All medical outcomes,
1:54.2	if you really look at the facts in the scientific or medical peer review literature, yet most
2:00.2	of the reports don't do that. They take what are generally very coarse endpoints, life expectancy
	...

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