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Nice Krugman slashing by David Hogberg at the American Spectator:

...Krugman's attempt to paint our health care system as inferior,

The only reason universal coverage seems hard to achieve here is the spectacular inefficiency of the U.S. health care system. Americans spend more on health care per person than anyone else -- almost twice as much as the French, whose medical care is among the best in the world. Yet we have the highest infant mortality and close to the lowest life expectancy of any wealthy nation.

I'm not going to get into the defects of using life expectancy and infant mortality as measurements of a health care system (go here for that). The question here is whether Krugman knows that these are poor measures. Since 2002 he has written a least 8 columns in the New York Times plus an article in both the New York Times Magazine and the New York Review of Books using these measures to bash our health care system. It is difficult to believe that, in all that time, he has never received an email telling him that such measures tell us little about a health care system. Indeed, going back to one of his columns from 2005, it's pretty clear that he has received such an email:

Most Americans probably don't know that we have substantially lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality figures than other advanced countries. It would be wrong to jump to the conclusion that this poor performance is entirely the result of a defective health care system; social factors, notably America's high poverty rate, surely play a role. Still, it seems puzzling that we spend so much, with so little return.

Krugman is clearly weasel-wording his way to an admission that life expectancy and infant mortality are poor measures of a health care system. So, Krugman knows that these measures are lousy, but he continues to use them. I can't imagine why.

By the way, does anyone know why the Spectator continues to give a platform to Ben Stein (this Hogberg article's web page features a prominent link to Stein's contributions)? Isn't the New York Times enough of an outlet for Stein's elitist tax-hiking agenda? Does a small conservative journal need to participate, too?

Thanks to reader Jameson Campaigne for the link.

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