Friday, December 9, 2011

U.S. Health Care #1? Color Me Dubious, Too

Aaron Carroll has a good catch on The Hill's "Healthwatch" blog giving an uncritical eye to a recent study by a British conservative thinktank, the Legatum Institute. Its 2011 "Prosperity Index" ranks the United States #1 in the world for health. Not only that, the U.S. is far ahead of #2 Switzerland, with an index of 3.54 vs. 3.03, over 16% higher. Problem is, the U.S. scores only so-so on what both Carroll and I would consider the most important variables, healthy life expectancy (27th) and infant mortality (36th), does pretty well on some measures (tuberculosis, sanitation) and poorly on others (respiratory diseases), and only ranks #1 on one of the index components: health care spending. Since the U.S. has been seeing worsening bang for our health care spending bucks, this does not compute.

As Carroll notes, it is not clear how you weight these variables in such a way that the U.S. could possibly come out #1, and the explanation gives no real clue of the relative weights, just longer and shorter lines that are supposed to tell us the relative weights without any actual numbers. More confusing still (and I think Carroll misses this), the health variables have weight in both "income" and "well-being" regression analyses. While health spending per capita is more highly weighted than life expectancy and infant mortality on the "well-being" side, as Carroll notes, on the "income" side the reverse is true. Not that the weights, whatever they really are, make sense.

Searching the prosperity.com website for the promised detail on the methodology, I was unable to find any rationale for the choice of variables (let alone their weights) beyond the bland claim that the eight sub-indices were based "on decades of empirical and theoretical research done by established experts." That certainly clears it up. More curiously still, in response to why it uses such a complicated methodology, the FAQs answer, "The Prosperity Index is an assessment of the DRIVERS of prosperity. We do not seek to identify which countries are prosperous or not." I would have thought the latter was the whole point, given that they have already imposed a concept of "prosperity" that is 50% income and 50% "well-being." Compare this with the UN's Human Development Index, which is 1/3 income, 1/3 health, and 1/3 education.

So I'll email the folks at prosperity.com and see if I can find out the answers to these methodological questions. Meanwhile, like Aaron Carroll, color me dubious, too.

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