If Americans think healthcare in the United States is bad, they should “go to Canada and try to find a specialist,” suggested Dana Perino on “The Five” Tuesday night. “Go to Scotland. Go to England. It is a disaster, right?” she added.
Perino insisted that her late step-mother-in-law struggled to find medical treatment for a UTI, presumably in Canada, Scotland, or England, for 18 weeks.
“And I can understand how frustrated people get on all sides of the thing, but when you say that health care is a right, as Bernie Sanders did today, he said he disagreed with the violence, but he said, but he’s showing us what people have come to know, that healthcare is a right. Okay, if you believe that, how are you paying for it?” Perino added.
Of course as is usual for right wing claims about health care, what Perino says isn’t actually true. In fact, the United States regularly ranks behind other developed nations in health care outcomes.
For instance, in 2021 the Commonwealth Fund, a U.S.-based private nonprofit foundation that offers grants for health care and financially backs health-related research, compared the healthcare systems of 11 high-income countries.
In the first section of the report the country’s health care system performances were assessed across five categories: access to care, care process, administrative efficiency, equity and health care outcomes. The list of countries included Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The US ranked last in every category except care process, in which the country clocked in as the second-best. The overall ranking of the United States’ health care system was 11/11 – last place.
The fourth section of the report also revealed that while the United States is a leader in health care spending, the country is again in last place in terms of health care system performance.
“The U.S. has the poorest performance on the affordability subdomain, scoring much lower than even the next-lowest country, Switzerland (Exhibit 5). Compared to residents of the U.S., residents of the Netherlands, the U.K., Norway, and Germany are much less likely to report that their insurance denied payment of a claim or paid less than expected,” the report’s authors found. “Residents of these countries are also less likely to report difficulty in paying medical bills.”
Of course, there is always the possibility Perino meant what she said positively. Perhaps she actually was advising Americans who are fed up with the overpriced, often cruel system they’re stuck in to check out something better instead. We’ll keep an eye out for further commentary on this topic.
You can watch the clip from “The Five” in the video below.
