[ExI] socialism

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Feb 24, 2019, at 5:25 PM, <spike at rainier66.com> <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Feb 24, 2019, at 10:35 AM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It’s even more striking given that for other goods and services, the US is significantly cheaper than most comparable countries...
> 
> It isn't clear that there is a direct comparison.  In Europe, a student can get a bachelors degree in medicine.  In the US, a student must have a bachelor's degree, usually in a scientific field, just to apply for medical school.  The US medical schools take only the top qualified candidates of those who already hold a bachelor's degree.
> 
> Where is that comparison taken into account?
> 
> We should compare European countries with other European countries, and compare the US to other countries which also require bachelors degrees for medical school admissions.

I don’t think any given European nation is necessarily more comparable with any other European nation. (Is Iceland really comparable to France in many significant ways?) All these comparisons can involve confounding factors. One simply has to be aware of the limits and underscore them... But one comparison with many other nations — especially Western Europe and Japan — is that the US has more public spending in total and per person in healthcare than other nations. That huge amount of money pouring into the healthcare sector should be something any reasonable person should  expect to have some impact (on prices). (Of course, one could blame it on US-Americans being less healthy, but the US governments spends even more than nations with the same or worse healthy people.)

Regards,

Dan
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