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Conquering Cancer with Private Medicine
Few things in life are as terrifying as a diagnosis of cancer. But for millions in the United States, the news just got a little bit better. Death rates for those suffering from cancer are actually beginning to drop. In particular, death rates have declined for the four most common forms of cancer: lung, colorectal, prostate and female breast cancers. Overall, fewer U.S. citizens died of cancer than at anytime in the past 70 years.

While there are many reasons for this welcome trend, one reason is the much-maligned U.S. free-market health care system.

The one common characteristic of all national health care systems, including Canada's, is that they ration care. Sometimes, they ration it explicitly, denying certain types of treatment altogether. More often, they ration indirectly, imposing global budgets that limit the availability of high-tech medical equipment, or which require long waits for patients seeking treatment.

In the United States, by contrast, there are no such limits, meaning that the most advanced treatment options are far more available. This translates directly into saved lives.

Take prostate cancer, for example. Even though U.S. men are more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer than their counterparts in other countries, they are less likely to die from the disease. Less than one out of five American men with prostate cancer will die from it, but 57% of British men and nearly half of French and German men will. Even in Canada, a quarter of men diagnosed with prostate cancer, die from the disease.

That is, in part, because in most countries with national health insurance, the preferred treatment for prostate cancer is ... to do nothing. Prostate cancer is a slow disease. Most patients are older and will live for several years after diagnosis. Therefore, it is not cost-effective in a world of socialized medicine to treat the disease aggressively. The approach saves money, but comes at a human cost.

Similar results can be found for other forms of cancer. For instance, just 30% of U.S. citizens diagnosed with colon cancer die from it, compared to 74% in Britain, 62% in New Zealand, 58% in France, 57% in Germany, 53% in Australia, and 36% in Canada. ...