Murdoch's WSJ - Fair and Balanced - Heh.

Bad Medicine - WSJ.com:

But America's health care is not doing badly. Indeed a National Center for Policy Analysis study from last March shows how much better we are doing than countries like Canada, Britain, and other European nations that have government health care control:

Breast-cancer mortality is 52% higher in Germany and 88% higher in Britain than in the U.S.

Prostate-cancer mortality is 457% higher in Norway and 604% higher in Britain than in the U.S.

Eighty-nine percent of middle-aged women in the U.S. have had a mammogram, compared with 72% in Canada.

Fifty-four percent of men in the U.S. have had a prostate-specific antigen test, compared with 16% of Canadian men.

As for the availability of health care, another study shows that 74% of those in the U.S. meet for scheduled doctors appointments within four weeks, while only 42% of British and 40% of Canadians do. Only 10% of Americans wait longer than two months, while 33% of Brits and 42% of Canadians wait that long.

On average, doctors in a survey say neurosurgery should be performed within 5.8 weeks, but in Canada it takes about 31 weeks. And orthopedic surgery should be within 11 weeks, but in Canada it takes 37 weeks. So it is pretty clear that government health-insurance monopoly is dangerously inefficient.

You know, I always used to really like the Journal. Even though I disagreed more often than not with their editorial page, I felt that their reporting and analysis standards were very high. This piece is, unfortunately, emblematic of the direction the paper seems to be going since the Fox purchase. This is absolute dreck.

First off, there is no logical connection in the data used to support the point. Picking and choosing a few sliver data points where the US system is (perhaps) better than specific public health systems DOES NOT lead to the conclusion that the US system is better overall, and even less to the conclusion that private systems are in general better than public. Second, even on the data points selected, it's not clear that the US system is better. Take the prostate specific antigen testing. The current evidence indicates that PSA testing should not be used as a general screening tool across the broad population of men. (See e.g. No Evidence to Support Routine PSA Screening and the National Cancer Institute's Fact Sheet on PSA Testing.) So, lower, targeted use of PSA testing may indicate a better systemic result than higher levels.

The conclusion, "[s]o it's pretty clear that government health-insurance monopoly is dangerously inefficient" is a ludicrous overreach from the data presented. Sorry guys, if you want to do more than preach to your Fox News besotted choir, you will need to do much, much better.