He provided some research a few pages back that has a bunch of different ways to measure quality and relates them to spending. They aren't perfect, but they mean a whole lot more to me than all the anecdotes that come up when this topic is discussed.
Things like life expectancy, mortality rates, medical errors, and how many doctors/nurses/beds per 1,000 population seem to be the most common ways to measure quality. If we are indeed spending significantly more per capita than other countries, we certainly don't seem to be getting the best results for it.
Life expectancy: horrible choice as a gauge of
medical quality as too many factors beyond medical care go into it.
Mortality rates: would be a wonderful choice if we had a uniform measure. Unfortunately, too many countries think a child that dies within a day of being born is a stillbirth. The United States classifies that as an infant death. (This is an example of the non-uniformity of measure).
Medical Errors: this may be a good choice. However, I would bet it suffers from similar measurement issues as Mortality rates.
Number of doctors/nurses/beds: Excellent choice. However, as that would be a symptom of government enforced shortages (medical licensure et al...), I don't think that's a good measure of whether a free market works better when it's decidedly NOT a free market.
As for spending, I note our public spending per capita on medical care is ALREADY higher than almost every other country (Iceland, Norway, and Luxemburg the only other exceptions).
If we are already outspending these other countries in government money on healthcare, why not address THAT issue rather than attacking the private spending on healthcare? Let's just expand the VA hospital system and send everyone on any form of government payment (Medicare, medicaid, VA) there.
That way the government can control its own costs and the private healthcare system can go its own way. Change nothing about coverage for anyone else, just "fix" the government side.
But we can't do that, it has to be "comprehensive" reform. The reason is that these people aren't interested in "fixing" things or lowering costs. They are interested in moving this country step by step into a European-style socialist hellhole.
As I have thought many times, I have to wonder: What happens to the world when they finally succeed in killing the goose that lays the golden eggs?