Erick Erickson at redstate.com examines some of the disinformation coming from the left.
Tell any pro-ObamaCare Democrat that socialized healthcare doesn't work, and you are sure to receive the smug reply that "countries with a single-payer system have a higher life expectancy." Technically, that's true. But, as the saying goes, there are "lies, damned lies and statistics." The lie in this particular set of stats is indeed not in the stats themselves, but in the inference you are asked to draw from them. You are told, for example, that Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom rate higher in life expectancy than the U.S. because of their public healthcare systems.
You're asked to believe that all this happens in a vaccuum. That the only - or at least largest - factor in life expectancy is the mode and quality of health insurance. But that isn't the case. The Life Expectancy figure is based upon an average of death ages from any cause; and that includes non-medical causes.
But you are asked to ignore other, non-medical causes of death. Causes like violent crime, household accidents, car accidents, etc. These are numbers which should not be ignored in this discussion; if average age of death is seen as important to the issue of healthcare, certainly the circumstances surrounding those deaths, and whether a single-payer system would actually effect those rates, are equally important.
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