Sen. John McCain Lies About Foreign Healthcare VIDEO

by TheCameraObscura | June 16, 2009 at 02:48 pm

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The Republican smear machine has gone into action, right on schedule. Sen. John McCain, who has universal health care through the government, is on TV trying to scare Americans on how awful universal health care through the government is.

Of course, McCain trotted out the same old lies, prepared by anti-healthcare lobbyist Frank Luntz, about how awful government run health care is in foreign countries, even though this private health insurance propaganda flies in the face of reality.

Today, President Obama spoke before the American Medical Association about the immediate need for far-reaching health care reform. He insisted that one of the options presented to Americans “needs to be a public option that will give people a broader range of choices and inject competition into the health care market so that force waste out of the system and keep the insurance companies honest.”

On CNN earlier today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who has universal health care through the federal government, rejected the public option as “a non-starter.” He admitted that the current “competition” between “1,300 health insurance companies in America today” is not successfully driving down costs — but insisted that a government plan could never be more cost efficient:

MCCAIN: I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. Over time you’ll drive them all out, and the idea that somehow the government can administer health care in a more efficient fashion than the private sector I think flies in the face of examples of other countries that have done so.

This tired old lie has been debunked many times by the World Health Organization and by other studies.

The United States ranked last in terms of efficiency among five other nations with universal health care, according to a Common Wealth study. In fact, the purely government-run Great Britain ranked first:

Compared with five other nations — Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom — the U.S. health care system ranks last or next-to-last on five dimensions of a high performance health system: quality, access, efficiency, equity, and healthy lives.

Efficiency: On indicators of efficiency, the U.S. ranks last among the six countries, with the U.K. and New Zealand ranking first and second, respectively. The U.S. has poor performance on measures of national health expenditures and administrative costs as well as on measures of the use of information technology and multidisciplinary teams. Also, of sicker respondents who visited the emergency room, those in Germany and New Zealand are less likely to have done so for a condition that could have been treated by a regular doctor, had one been available.