No, he's not assuming anything like that. He's observing that if the US is slightly worse on average (for the sake of argument), but you have what you claim are a large number of people being actively harmed by the system, then to make up for it you must have a large number of being receiving unbelievably good outcomes, or you can't end up with "slightly worse on average" in the end. It's a very simple mathematical point.
I'd observe that in general, the complaint with the US medical system is that it is too expensive, or that for what we pour into it it ought to be clearly the best everywhere across all measures instead of merely near the top. (Which is rather more accurate; it isn't "slightly below average", it's "slightly behind best", and there are rather a lot of individual measures in which it is the best.) It isn't that it's a terrible system in general. You have to game stats pretty hard to make it an actively bad system in terms of raw outcome.
Simpson's Paradox says you can have rich people country A outperform rich people in country B and poor people in country A outperform poor people in country B and have country B outperform country A when both groups are put together.
This is probably not the case, but since this is hacker news I'm being a dork about the math.
In 2007 there were 8,324 deaths linked to MRSA in the UK. In 2005, there were between 4,429-8,850 (6,639 w/ 95% CI) deaths linked to MRSA in the US. There are more than 5 times as many people in the United States than in the UK.
I obviously do not have the specific stats at my fingertips to refute the anecdote you've supplied, but if there were a way for us to bet on which of our arguments the correct statistic is going to support, I'd bet on my argument.
Still, for those numbers to be useful the rate of infection, detection, treatment, death, AND linking deaths to MRSA must be considered before you can compare those healthcare systems as well as a near constant rare of infection.
Sorry, I got Clostridium confused with MRSA. But 1,652 normalized for population is still higher than the US MRSA fatality number!
I'm not sure what the second sentence means. If you're saying we don't know how to properly attribute deaths to MRSA, what does any MRSA statistic say about health care?
You have a long row to hoe with the overall argument you're making. It is, for instance, not hard to link deaths to heart disease, and heart disease is the leading cause of death in the US. The US has fewer heart disease deaths per 100,000 people than Austria, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, the UK, Finland, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Hungary, and Slovakia, and is closer to Germany and Denmark, the #14 and #15 followers to the US's #12, than it is to Austria's #11.
Yes, I am saying in many cases we don't know cause of death. In most of the US we do a crap job of discovering cause of death in many cases. When you dig into the numbers specific coroners often have different old guy died in sleep dumping grounds. 'Hart disease' often ends up as a grab bag for any number of quiet killers such as: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulmonary_Embolism.
I'd observe that in general, the complaint with the US medical system is that it is too expensive, or that for what we pour into it it ought to be clearly the best everywhere across all measures instead of merely near the top. (Which is rather more accurate; it isn't "slightly below average", it's "slightly behind best", and there are rather a lot of individual measures in which it is the best.) It isn't that it's a terrible system in general. You have to game stats pretty hard to make it an actively bad system in terms of raw outcome.