January 11, 2008

In the Wall Street Journal today Scott Gottlieb, MD a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, takes a cold hard look at Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards claim that the insurer Cigna had wrongfully denied a young leukemia patient a liver transplant - and that, under a single-payer system, she would have received better care.

Campaigning in the primaries, former Sen. John Edwards is leveraging the tragic story of Nataline Sarkisyan -- the 17-year-old California woman who recently died awaiting a liver transplant -- to press his political attack on insurance companies and argue for European-style, single-payer health care. But the former trial lawyer, accustomed to using anecdotes of human suffering to frame his rhetoric, is twisting the facts. Organ transplantation, like many areas of medicine, provides a poor basis for his political thesis that single-payer health care offers a more equitable allocation of scarce resources, or better clinical outcomes.

Gottlieb looks at U.S. v. UK data on organ transplants and finds that, overall, the U.S.'s mixed public-private system performs better than the NHS. Read the whole thing.

Posted by Paul Howard at January 11, 2008 02:23 PM

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