Ensign: Exclude Gunshot Wounds from Lifespan Stats; We Love Our Guns

It's been tried before: those against the public option for Universal Health Care like to say that we should exclude deaths from guns from statistical evidence that the U.S. lags behind other nations. Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) made not just that statement, but also that deaths from auto accidents should be excluded as well, as both are "cultural factors." Here's an exchange between him and Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND).

ENSIGN: The first one you said on preventative deaths — Are you aware on that if you take out gun accidents and auto accidents, the United States actually is better than those other countries?

CONRAD: You can rack and stack –

ENSIGN: Auto accidents don’t have anything to do with health care. I mean, we’re just a much more mobile society. On the preventative deaths, if you take out auto accidents — because we drive our cars a lot more, they do public transportation — and so you have to compare health care system with health care system.

If you compare cancer rates, survival rates after five years, cardiovascular disease after five years, the United States does better than Europe.

CONRAD: We do very well.

ENSIGN: We do better than any of the countries that you pointed out.

CONRAD: Well, I can tell you this: I’d go back to the statistics that have been generated by lots of organizations on quality outcomes, and other countries that do have universal care and do a much better job of controlling costs than we do, on metric after metric, finish ahead of us. And I’d just direct you to the T.R. Reid book which is loaded with analysis from objective observers as to quality outcomes. And those countries, much lower costs than we do as a share of GDP, high quality outcomes — whether we’re first in a category or someone else is first — nonetheless, high quality outcomes in those countries, at much lower costs.

The problem with jobbing statistics as Ensign wants to do, is that we can't ignore those losses. It's not like you can say, OK, no auto accidents and no gunshot wounds in this hospital. I guess we need to stop having those whiny police officers complaining about gunshot wounds.

In reality, the United States currently ranks 50th out of 224 nations in life expectancy, with an average life span of 78.1 years, according to 2009 estimates from the CIA World Factbook.

We're the only industrialized nation without some sort of universal health care. A recent Harvard study said as many as 45,000 people die annually due to lack of insurance. How sad is that?

Update: the Senate Finance Committee has defeated the public option for health care.

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