Matthew Yglesias today rebuts this sta­tis­tic about life expectancy in the Netherlands ver­sus the United States:

At birth, some­one liv­ing in the Netherlands can expect to live 2.35 years longer than some­one born in the US, but at age 65, the dif­fer­ence is reversed, and some­one liv­ing in the US can expect to live 0.4 years longer than some­one liv­ing in the Netherlands. This dif­fer­ence can be explained by assum­ing that semi-socialized health care is bet­ter for young and worse for old peo­ple, or, at least as likely, dif­fer­ent poli­cies are not the main cause of the dif­fer­ence. [empha­sis original]

Yglesias writes that:

But inso­far as we want to exam­ine the health care issue, both sides of this fac­toid sup­port social­ism. Dutch peo­ple of all ages enjoy a quasi-socialized sys­tem of health insur­ance pro­vi­sion (by European stan­dards, there’s a lot of pri­vate sec­tor involve­ment in Dutch health care). Americans under the age of 65 par­tic­i­pate in an over­whelm­ingly pri­vate sec­tor health insur­ance mar­ket. But Americans over the age of 65 par­tic­i­pate in a Canadian-style national health insur­ance scheme known as Medicare. The data, if we want to take it seri­ously, indi­cates that the Dutch sys­tem is bet­ter than pri­vate sec­tor med­i­cine but worse than Medicare and tends to sup­port a “Medicare for all” approach.

This reminds me of the inter­view that John Stewart did with Bill Kristol in which he gets Kristol to admit the supremacy of the government-run mil­i­tary health care system.

It just seems so bla­tantly hyp­o­crit­i­cal for peo­ple to extol the virtues of Medicare and mil­i­tary health insur­ance and yet con­done a pub­lic option for health care. Despite this we’re still hav­ing to rely upon peo­ple like Yglesias and Stewart to point out this hypocrisy. This should be what the Democrats do if they really want this plan to pass.