“She’s never had redneck votes before. I see no reason why she couldn’t take the high road in the closing days of this campaign.”

I just got the latest Obama-trashing (He’s a Muslim!) email forward:

When you are faking a pose for a camera photo opportunity, at least you can get the phone turned in the right direction! And he wants to be President??? ???

It’s a pretty bad Photoshop. You can tell someone just looked through about 1,000 Obama stock photos until they found something where what they would have to move or remove was entirely in front of a (nearly) uniform background. Then they solved all the rest of their problems with massive blurring and called it a day. It’s a pretty bad job, but I would say it’s a masterpiece when you consider the design nightmare of the site that claims credit. Here’s the original photo:

I’ve seen this statistic trotted out a lot (that the US has the best cancer survival rate), and I knew there was something wrong with using that to describe the proficiency of an entire health care system, but I guess I never really thought it through until now.

The problem is that it describes how well a system cares for sick people. I know, I know, that’s what health care is about, right? Well, no. That’s “sick care”, as some people aptly call it. It means that while you’re healthy you get nothing, and when you become sick enough to require emergency treatment you get it. If you have insurance, your story ends there. If not, and you survive, you’re bankrupt and likely in debt for the rest of your life.

That’s the difference between health care and sick care. In sick care I don’t doubt that we’re NUMBER ONE! But when you look at health care metrics, it’s not so rosy. I took the liberty of looking up some health care metrics from the World Health Organization and chose a subset of countries to avoid having to crunch too much data. I basically chose all the countries I could think of that you would expect to have a good health care system: Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States. Let’s take a look at how the US fares:

• Life expectancy: Last
• Healthy life expectancy: Tied for last with Denmark
• Adult mortality rate: Last
• Infant mortality rate: Last
• Cancer mortality rate: 10th out of 20**

But here’s where we do have a very commanding lead. Nearly doubling the mean value for the countries selected:

• Per capita total expenditure on health: First at 6096 US dollars per year.

Now, I’m not saying that the US has the worst health care system out there, but it’s certainly not the best. And for the money we’re spending, it should be. Can a free market system work for health care? Maybe. But I have a hunch it only works on a blackboard with a 100%-informed population, all able and willing to purchase and hold insurance with no gaps in coverage over their entire lifetimes.

**Notice how this figure changes when you use the entire population (as the W.H.O does) rather than just start counting once a person is admitted into an ER? That’s because when you figure in the entire population, preventative measures will effect your statistics. So, despite the fact that we’re so good at keeping people from dying once they get to an ER, we’re so bad at keeping them out of the ER in the first place that you are actually just as likely to die from cancer in the US as you are in any of the other countries I’ve looked at.

I went to see Obama tonight. There seemed to be a really good turnout here in Eugene, despite most students being gone for the break already. They filled up Mac Court (about 9,000 not including all the standing room they had on the court) and I was stuck out in the soccer field with everyone else who hadn’t been waiting in line since the morning; probably at least 5 thousand more. I’m not kidding about those lines either. There was already a line at 9 in the morning (he got in at 9 at night) and by 1 there were already two lines several blocks long. I did manage to get pretty close to the police barricades though, and got the obligatory blurry and terrible camera phone shots when he came by to shake hands.

The first thing he said to the crowd was, “I’m sorry about your Ducks”, which I think may make up for him picking Mississippi State in his bracket.