Ben Shapiro Defends Joe Biden on Health Care, Says Life Expectancy Stats Shouldn't Include Accidents, Suicides

Conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro defended 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's "This is America" health care comments at Thursday night's debate.

Shapiro touted the United States health care system as one of the finest in the world on The Ben Shapiro Show as he defended the former vice president's widely derided rebuke to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders' comparison of the U.S. and Canada.

At the debate, Sanders argued Americans spend "twice as much" as Canadians, prompting Biden to swiftly reply, "This is America." Shapiro agreed with Biden's touting of the U.S. health care system and said life expectancy data would be much higher if car accidents, suicides and homicides were removed as "confounding factors."

"In the United States of America, we are spending twice as much per capita on healthcare as the Canadians or any other major country on earth," Sanders said at the Democratic presidential debate in Houston Thursday evening.

"This is America," Biden shot back, later prompting late-night comedians and left-wing political pundits to mock what they labeled as inane flag-waving posturing.

Shapiro, the conservative founder of The Daily Wire website, said Biden was correct in his rebuke of Sanders' push for Medicare-for-all and a less costly U.S. health care system.

"When he says, 'This is America,' and not Canada, he is correct," Shapiro told his audience earlier this week. "People on the left are laughing at him but the fact is when he says that he's not wrong."

Shapiro then went on to corroborate Biden by making the claim that if vehicular deaths, suicides and murders were not included in statistics then the U.S. would have one of the top life expectancy averages in the world.

"The fact is medical innovation happens here, if you want a surgery you're going to be able to get a surgery in the United States of America. In fact, health care outcomes in the United States are still pretty good when you remove all of the confounding factors. In fact if you take away car accident deaths and homicide and suicide from the national statistics, what you end up with is the United States as one of the top countries as far as life expectancy. So Joe Biden is not wrong on any of this."

Health care experts and left-leaning political pundits took to social media to ridicule Shapiro's statistical health care defense.

"Life expectancy is high if you don't count deaths," replied one amused Twitter user. "If you remove all causes of death, statistically Americans are immortals."

At a July 2016 rally in Philadelphia for Hillary Clinton, Biden riled up the crowd with jingoistic rhetoric and said he tells every world leader "it's never, never a good bet to bet against America." He went on to tout America as number one in innumerable fields including health care.