Quote:
Originally Posted by Azure
WHO's assessment system was based on five indicators: overall level of population health; health inequalities (or disparities) within the population; overall level of health system responsiveness (a combination of patient satisfaction and how well the system acts); distribution of responsiveness within the population (how well people of varying economic status find that they are served by the health system); and the distribution of the health system's financial burden within the population (who pays the costs).
http://www.who.int/whr/2000/media_ce.../en/index.html
No, nothing in there about being efficient. Nothing at all. The WHO ranked the best health care systems in the world, and despite saying that 6 out of the top 10 systems were two-tiered in certain ways, they made a huge mistake. |
Not to cherry pick your post, but I did find this a little bit funny. Since.... in fact, efficiency (which was my original point) is
mentioned nowhere in the WHO's criteria.
Changing your "appeal to common practice" into an "appeal to authority" doesn't really help your case anyway. You've yet to provide a single shred of evidence that two-tier health care is
more efficient.
You've painted yourself into a bit of a corner, but you can't get out of it by pretending that I said something more vague like "doesn't work"--which is in any case so broad that it would be impossible to prove or disprove anyway. We could easily just be working with different definitions.
My contention has nothing to do with "whether a system works"--that is, whether it provides health care to people who seek it out. Obviously, two-tier systems do that less well than universal systems--that is what they are by definition. The only rational argument for a two-tier system is if it were more efficient--i.e. it were a method to bring down the total cost of the system. The available evidence indicates that the overall effect of a two-tier system is the opposite.
You've yet to disprove that; indeed, you haven't even tried. Instead, you tried to disprove an altogether different claim--that two-tier, or multipayer systems don't work at all, which was never what I said. Indeed, that would be absurd; we have, nominally, a multi-payer system in Canada, and that, along with two-tier health care, is also what they have in the U.S. According to some definitions it works just fine. But it's not efficient. It costs a lot relative to a universal, single-payer system.
Your list from the WHO does nothing to contradict that claim. Surely you can see that.