Cherry picking examples to claim that the US health care system "is still the best" when it comes to pandemic response: conservative columnist Marc Thiessen

When DC released its Sustainability Plan during the Gray Administration, in 2013 I wrote my longest post to that date ("Realizing all aspects of Sustainable DC: it all comes down to chickens...") making the point that to be the most sustainable city in the US, the city would have to put in practice "the best practice" in each of the functional areas.

Instead, most of what the city has introduced in sustainable practice tends to lag best practice pretty significantly, compared to what leading cities in the various functional areas are already doing.

E.g., a couple years ago DPW announced it would start compost and yard waste pickup, but in 6 years. etc.

Only two DC sustainability policies were early best practice: the charge for plastic bags, in 2012; and DC Water's use of waste in effluent to generate electricity, to reduce waste products and to improve the quality of waste converted into fertilizer and compost.

DC takes credit for having so many LEED certified buildings, but that was a function of timing of construction during the recession. And in ordinary times it has high rates of transit use, but that's a function of the city's urban design which dates to 1791 and its relative compactness and density, not so much active promotion by city leaders ("DC as a suburban agenda dominated city").

While much of the commentsphere criticizes the Washington Post for being "very left," they do carry a number of particular right wing columnists, in particular Gary Abernathy, Hugh Hewitt, and Marc Thiessen that would fit right in at the New York Post or Wall Street Journal, but there are others besides.

Generally, I don't read any of them, but from time to time I delve into a column or two just to piss myself off.  Most recently, I read Marc Thiessen's column about "Why this pandemic is an indictment of socialized medicine." From the article:

While the federal government’s pandemic preparedness was sorely lacking, the fact is America’s system of private medicine has left us far better positioned for today’s crisis than other nations. As Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, explained in an interview, here in the United States, “we’re going to have a better experience [with this pandemic] than a lot of other countries because of how good our system is at delivering critical care.”

There is a great takedown of the poor argumentation of law professor and self-described "contrarian" Richard Epstein's article about how the coronavirus is no big deal.  The author made the point that what we should be aiming for in discourse isn't being contrary, but using evidence, experimenting, and testing, with the aim of generating the best, most robust answers.

That point can be made equally when looking at the writings of people like Marc Thiessen.

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Or Gary Abernathy, whose latest piece, "Our elected leaders need to reclaim control from the doctors," fails to acknowledge that it was the political leaders deliberately not listening to the doctors that has got us to the place where we are, with tens of thousands of needless deaths and infections and a significant closure of the US economy.

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Although to be fair, Thiessen does criticize the federal government's failures in terms of testing and making sure critical equipment was available.

But the reality is that the nations of the world that have done the best job in terms of response to the coronavirus, even if there have been mistakes, have been countries with public health care systems.  They can be a mix of public and private facilities, but ultimately there is universal health care coverage, paid for through taxation.

Crematorium Temple of Piacenza saturated with corpses awaiting cremation due to the coronavirus emergency (23 March 2020).  Photo: Claudio Furlan/Lapresse.

Yes, "socialized medicine" didn't "stop the virus" in Italy.

But the issue really isn't as much about private vs. public health care in this situation as it is about public health and the public health response.

Both Italy and the US failed.

But in terms of health care outcomes, the differences between Italy and the US aren't so much about public vs. private healthcare as much as they are about the relative wealth of the two nations, the respective public health failures, and the "luck of the draw" in terms of the timing of "spreading events" ("Soccer match in Italy linked to epicenter of deadly coronavirus," Boston Globe) before most places started instituting stay at home directives.

In the US, Ohio is touted for being one of the earliest actors in putting restrictions on public events, to great effect ("Did Ohio get it right? Early intervention, preparation for pandemic may pay off," Washington Post).

"Wawa donates refrigerated truck to help New Jersey store bodies of coronavirus victims," Philadelphia Inquirer. Photo: Elizabeth Robinson.

Similarly, the City of San Francisco's early stay at home order has had dramatic effect.  SF, with a bit more than 10% of the population of New York City has 17 deaths from the coronavirus, while NYC has almost 11,000.

When it comes to comparing the US, which has a privately focused health care system ("Profit over people, cost over care: America's broken healthcare exposed by virus," Guardian) to countries that have a public health care system, rather than compare the US to other countries that are similarly failing in coronavirus response (Italy, Spain, France, UK--almost 13,000 deaths so far, which doesn't include out of hospital deaths), why not compare the US to other countries that have public health care systems that are succeeding in responding to the coronavirus?   .. with success defined as relatively few deaths.

Examples would be Ireland ("Why is coronavirus killing so many more people in the UK than in Ireland?," Guardian) which has 365 deaths so far, and the count includes out-of-hospital deaths, which many nations are not counting; Canada (1,010 deaths), Germany (3,800), Greece ("Greece has won a battle against COVID-19 but war is not over: PM," Reuters), Japan, South Korea, Taiwan (6 deaths), or even Australia?  Plus, Singapore (but it's an outlier in terms of being small, a city-state, and heavily authoritarian).

And Britain's failure isn't because of "socialized medicine" but because of political failures and how the government's austerity practices over the past ten years have severely underfunded the National Health Service, public health, and aging care.

Conclusion.  The US response to coronavirus hasn't demonstrated that the way health care is organized and funded in the US is superior to national health care systems in other countries, either fully public or a mix of public and private services.

It's not enough to say "we're the best."  It's to be the best. 

And the way that for most people health insurance is linked to employment shows how this completely blows up in a Depression event when people lose their jobs, and therefore, lose their health insurance ("Why a frayed safety net tests the U.S. coronavirus response," Christian Science Monitor).

Similarly, the US failures in public health management and execution are a function of underfunding and the diminishing respect for science and technical advice on the part of elected officials, especially the President of the United States, as well as a general failure to invest in pandemic protection and public health more generally.