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1. life expectancy:
yours and the who's lifespan (life expectancy) has been debunked a dozen times
life expectance is more about genetics and life style, than health care
we have a longer life expectancy than them as a whole
the number one place for life expectancy of asian women....USA
not to mention that life expectancy is more about genetics and LIFE STYLES (ie hamhocks, fried twinkies, and fried chicken, mcdonalds, fatbacks certainly dont help)
most other places..they walk/bike
most other places dont have 4 tv's to a house
posting about life expectancy..means actually very little to medicine
difference between us and the highest is....3.3 years ...is that realivily low (79yrs-82yrs)
and the reason...
is not health care
its....
LIFE STYLE (especially EATING, and EXERCISE), and democraphics (ethnics)
demographics, to include eating habits, GENES, TEEN PREGNANCIES, traffic, cancer, etc..ALL effect those numbers
yes I said traffic accidents....you think that the 2x amount of traffic accidents (of the world) is NOT going to lower the top level???
btw
asians have the HIGHEST life span...and FEMALE ASIAN AMERICANS have the highest life expectancy IN THE WORLD
its demographics
if you compared country "A" to country "B"...and said "A" has an average age of 38..and "B" has an average age of 51...which country do you think would be more PRODUCTIVE and HEALTHY
its the demographics
its like the life expectancy list
the USa has an AVERAGE life expectacny of 78.9 (number 30 something on the list)
but if you break it down further
in the USA, the asian american female has a life expectancy of 86(the HIGHEST in the WORLD)(((higher than the 82 in the actual country of japan)))
..whites are around 83...hispanics around 76...and blacks have a LOW LIFE expectacy around 66m/68f....giving us the AVERAGE of 78.9.....if you took the (12-15% population) of blacks of that list..we would have one of the top three life expectancies in the world....
demographic plays BIG ROLES
funny japan is higher than any of the european countries...in life expectancy..and the 3rd lowest in infant mortality....connected...hmmmmm....certainly genetic
we also have the HIGHEST teen pregnancy ...which leads to low baby weight, and high infant mortality.....and the hightest DEMOGRAPHIC with teen pregancies...the african americans (especially southern AA)
2. COST:
we (the taxpayer) cant afford it
look at the cost of the LOWPAYING medicare/medicaid.....900 billion just to PARTIALLY cover less than 70 million people ......900 billion to cover 1/5 of the population
singlepayer would cost between 3 trillion and 6 trillion EVERY YEAR (we already spend 1 trillion so the NEW added cost would be 2-5 trillion)
we have 140 million tax FILERS, (of which nealy 50% dont pay anything)
3 trillion divided by 140 million is what.......$20,000
6 trillion divided by 150 million is what......$40,000
thats between 20k to 40k PER TAXPAYER.....CAN YOU AFFORD THAT.... ?????
even if we we SOMEHOW able to get the costs down to lets say 5k per capita...thats still over 1.5 trillion a year...and the only way to keep costs down is the standard medicare/medicaid DENIALS (ie DENY CARE because of cost)
and let's not forget: Obesity rates among OECD nations increased in recent years, with the highest rate in the U.S. at 34.3% -- which means one in 3 Americans is by definition obese.
number of americans getting cancer (new cases) per year 1.8 million for a total of 19 million people being treated (fighting) each year...each year at least 570,000 die from cancer
number of americans with heart desease: 26.2 million and of those
((Number of visits with heart disease as primary diagnosis: 16 million ))
((Number of discharges with heart disease as first-listed diagnosis: 4.2 million))
number of americans in nursing homes: 2 million
More than 25 million Americans have significant vision loss.
(((hmmm more than 25 million americans are blind or going blind.....that's more than norway,finland, denmark,switzerland,and austria COMBINED TOTAL population....)))
number of americans with diabetes: 26 million
mumber of americans with asthma: 20 million....Each day 11 Americans die from asthma.
while some of those may overlap...look at those numbers 19,26,25,26,20...that's 116 million with MAJOR health problem,,costly problems......we will ALWAYS be the largest spender in the world...we have the 3rd hightest population in the world (next to china and india) and we have more people (total, not a percentage) with major problems than any other country in europe.....I just showed you at least 116 million people with cancer,heart,blindness, diabetes, asthma.......that's more than france and great britian COMBINED for their total populations.
singlepayer will not control these costs
how are you going to control the cost of medical equipment(mri or xray machines, etc)??????most xray machine are made in denmark
how are you going to control the cost of the rising electric bills the doctors/hospitals are facing????
how are you going to control the rising property tax/rent/mortgage that doctors face?????
how are you going to control the cost of supplies(gauze, plaster, silk, rubber, polystirene( a oil product)?????especially some supplies that arent even american
how are you going to control the cost of people salaries???? a maximum wage???
how they are going to control the employment costs for Doctors, nurses, technicians, hospital food operators, hospital linnon cleaning service, custodial services, medical transcribers........are you going to 'nationalize' every profession that is even remotely connected to medicine????
how are they going to control malpractice INSURANCE COSTS?????
dont you get it... medicine (like anyother SERVICE) costs money,,(,money that our government doesnt have)
I ask a simple question.....HOW are you going to control costs OF MEDICINE, not INSURANCE..........because you CANT...and it will get worse and worse as inflation devalues our dollar
Oh, please, not the electric bill again! Should we get a new category of health care worker and hook them up to treadmills to run generators?
I'm tired from a long day of working and I can't handle your novella. You've yapped about the electric bill before, as if to say that other countries' systems don't use electricity, or office buildings for that matter.
The proper question is whether you have any expository writing skills. You write like you're writing a shopping list for your next trip to Rantalot. No one wants to read it. Try paragraphs!
I used to be onboard for a way to reform our system to a more market centered approach, but the proposals I keep hearing won't address the primary issues. We need a long term answer to health reform and I believe that a single-payer (medicare type) system is the way to address this. I believe that the GOP needs to get on board with this. Conservatives in Canada and Europe acknowledge this system has broard positive results and the GOP needs to do the same.
The Australian system seems to be one of the most effective. Listed below is some information from their system.
Life Expectancy: 81.4
Infant Mortality: 4.2
Physicians per 1000 people: 2.8
Per capita expenditure per person: 3353
Healthcare cost as a % of GDP: 8.5
% of government revenue spent on healthcare: 17.7
And now...the same categoties for the United States:
Life Expectancy: 78.1
Infant Mortality: 6.8
Physicians per 1000 people: 2.4
Per capita expenditure per person: 7437
Healthcare cost as a % of GDP: 16
% of government revenue spent on healthcare: 18.5
As you can see...the numbers are certainly skewed in the Aussies favor. At this time I see no viable way that is being advocated by the GOP to resolve this issue. All the answers still result in a convoluted public/private amalgamation that has proven itself to be remarkably inefficient.
Are there other moderates, or center right folk that support a single payer system or am I the only one?
I certainly hope you're the only one. The less fake conservatives we have, the better.
Healthcare costs were manageable up until government entitlements injected billions into the market. There was no crisis in healthcare costs until after the welfare state was established. Then costs went up. Now that costs are high, people like you want the government to take over the system. Your solution to government screwing up a system that worked fine when it was private, is to have government take over the entire system. The same government whose education system is failing, social security system is failing, post office is failing, foreign wars are failing, you want to hand over total control of your medical decisions.
Good luck with that. But as for me, I'll make my own medical decisions thanks all the same.
Apology accepted. Your crucifixion will be delayed 3 days accordingly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wnewberry22
I used to be onboard for a way to reform our system to a more market centered approach, but the proposals I keep hearing won't address the primary issues.
What are the primary issues, and what handicap (mental or physical) prevents you from proposing issues that will address what you believe to be the "primary issues?"
Can you present evidence and facts showing how the health care system moved from the Free Market Economic System to its present Soviet-style Command Economic System?
Quote:
Originally Posted by wnewberry22
We need a long term answer to health reform...
Fine, I agree, and you can start by undoing all of the damage the American Hospital Association has caused over the last 79 years, starting with Obamacare.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wnewberry22
... and I believe that a single-payer (medicare type) system is the way to address this.
Based on what facts?
Quote:
Originally Posted by wnewberry22
I believe that the GOP needs to get on board with this. Conservatives in Canada and Europe acknowledge this system has broard positive results and the GOP needs to do the same.
The GOP needs to do the same......what, exactly? Embark on a campaign to reduce the population of the US from 315 Million to less than 9 Million so the US will be like the 25+ States in Europe that have populations of 9 Million or less?
From.... Delay, Denial and Dilution: The Impact of NHS Rationing on Heart Disease and Cancer
IEA Health and Welfare Unit
12% of kidney specialists in the UK said they had refused to treat patients due to limited resources (same source).
One study showed that patients accepted for dialysis stacked up this way.....
65 patients per million population UK
98 patients per million population in Canada
212 patients per million population in the US
Can you explain those numbers?
You want the good news or the bad news first?
I'll give you the good news: there's only 2 ways to explain it.
The bad news: both ways destroy any arguments for single-payer.
The first way to explain those numbers is how they statistically relate to population size.
The US, outnumbering Canada 10:1 in population would have a statistically high(er) rate of renal disease, and following from that, all other diseases and conditions as well. That means that the US cannot significantly reduce the cost of health care, which defeats the whole purpose of having single-payer.
The 2nd way to explain those numbers is that Americans are paying for the true cost of health care, and because they are, more people can receive dialysis treatment. That would also mean that the reason Canada and Britain have fewer patients, is because they ration health care. In other words you could do what other countries do.....spend less....but then spending less means denying care, or as the article says, delaying, denying and diluting care.
If you have problems with your kidneys, between Canada, Britain and the US, the best place to be is the US.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wnewberry22
The Australian system seems to be one of the most effective. Listed below is some information from their system.
Life Expectancy: 81.4
Infant Mortality: 4.2
Physicians per 1000 people: 2.8
Per capita expenditure per person: 3353
Healthcare cost as a % of GDP: 8.5
% of government revenue spent on healthcare: 17.7
And now...the same categoties for the United States:
Life Expectancy: 78.1
Infant Mortality: 6.8
Physicians per 1000 people: 2.4
Per capita expenditure per person: 7437
Healthcare cost as a % of GDP: 16
% of government revenue spent on healthcare: 18.5
As you can see...the numbers are certainly skewed in the Aussies favor. At this time I see no viable way that is being advocated by the GOP to resolve this issue.
Okay, you have answered one of the questions I posed to you, "What are the primary issues...?"
You get a fail on that.
There are several ways to measure life-expectancy: from birth to death; from age 13 to death, and from age 65 to death.
Social Security --- from the day FDR nationalized the 30-odd State social security programs then in operation -- only uses life-expectancy from age 65 upward.
I'm going to use Table V.A3.—Period Life Expectancy on Page 90 of the 2012 Social Security Trustees' Report and give you the life-expectancy for people age 65 for male and female:
2011 Male 17.7 years; Female 20.0 years.
In English, a male in the US who reaches the age of 65 will most likely live another 17.7 years to the age of 82.7 years, while a female who reaches the age of 65 will on average live another 20 years to age 85.
Australian Life Expectancy: 81.4 (from Birth)
US Life-Expectancy from age 65: 82.7 years (Males) and 85 years (Females).
Statistically significant?
Nope. How horrible can the US health care system be if people who reach the age of 65 live longer?
Next debunking....who do I want to debunk the Infant Mortality Myth? Survey says: The United States Center for Disease Control....
The first thing you notice is that the US has a higher rate of neonatal deaths, and an equally disproportionate amount of NICU spending (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit). Why? Because health care in the US is worse and more expensive?
No. It is because health care in the US is both better and more aggressive.
US doctors go to heroic extreme extraordinary measures to save the life of an infant, while European doctors will not lift a finger. US doctors will spend $500,000 on a child that will be dead in a matter of days no matter what happens --- Europeans will not.
A great example is Hydranencephaly: a child born without a brain. In the US, doctors will do everything to keep that child alive; hooking it up to life support in NICU and taking other actions even though that child has absolutely no chance whatsoever of life. European doctors take no actions: they simply hand the child over to the mother and wait for it to die.
One of the things noted by MacDorman and Matthews....
....is that if the US adopted the Swedish Metric for births, then the US infant mortality rate would decline 33%.
Why? Because there is a difference between the US and Sweden as to how gestational period is calculated, making it appear that Sweden has lower Infant Mortality Rate, or that the US has an higher rate, even though neither is true.
Infant mortality also ignores important major cultural differences between the US and Europe.
The US has an extraordinarily higher rate of premature births. Nature intended prime-time child-bearing years to be the onset of menses through age 28, not age 35-50. The two largest groups for premature births are teens and older women. You don't see that in Europe, and because you don't, their Infant Mortality Rates are lower -- and it has nothing to do with health care....in fact just the opposite....it is health care that causes an higher Infant Mortality rate in the US due to the fact that US doctors are aggressive and take extraordinary measures while Europeans do not.
Europeans also classify and report premature births differently: a child weighing less than 1,000 grams who dies is listed as a fetal death, and so is not counted as a live birth. That is true even if the infant survives for a week or more and should be listed as a perinatal death, like they are in the US.
There's also the issue of viability. European countries are more likely to record a non-viable birth as a still-birth, whereas in the US it is recorded as a live birth and then doctors take heroic actions to save it.
There's a relationship between Infant Mortality and Life-Expectancy (from Birth). If the US adopted the same health care metrics as Sweden, then the US Infant Mortality Rate would decrease, and life-expectancy would increase....
...and it wouldn't cost you anything....except changing how your define fetal, peri-natal and neo-natal deaths.
Australia
Per capita expenditure per person: 3353
Healthcare cost as a % of GDP: 8.5
% of government revenue spent on healthcare: 17.7
And now...the same categoties for the United States:
Per capita expenditure per person: 7437
Healthcare cost as a % of GDP: 16
% of government revenue spent on healthcare: 18.5
That data isn't relevant.
Health Status, Health Care and Inequality: Canada vs. the U.S.
NBER Working Paper No. 13429 Issued in September 2007 NBER Program(s): HCHE
Does Canada's publicly funded, single payer health care system deliver better health outcomes and distribute health resources more equitably than the multi-payer heavily private U.S. system? We show that the efficacy of health care systems cannot be usefully evaluated by comparisons of infant mortality and life expectancy. We analyze several alternative measures of health status using JCUSH (The Joint Canada/U.S. Survey of Health) and other surveys. We find a somewhat higher incidence of chronic health conditions in the U.S. than in Canada but somewhat greater U.S. access to treatment for these conditions. Moreover, a significantly higher percentage of U.S. women and men are screened for major forms of cancer. Although health status, measured in various ways is similar in both countries, mortality/incidence ratios for various cancers tend to be higher in Canada. The need to ration resources in Canada, where care is delivered "free", ultimately leads to long waits. In the U.S., costs are more often a source of unmet needs. We also find that Canada has no more abolished the tendency for health status to improve with income than have other countries. Indeed, the health-income gradient is slightly steeper in Canada than it is in the U.S.
University of Pennsylvania
ScholarlyCommons
PSC Working Paper Series Population Studies Center
7-1-2009
Low Life Expectancy in the United States: Is the Health Care System at Fault?
By the way, the answer to the question is "No, it the Health Care System is not at Fault."
Why Medicaid is a Humanitarian Catastrophe
Last July, I wrote about a landmark study conducted at the University of Virginia that found that surgical patients on Medicaid are 13 percent more likely to die than those without insurance of any kind. The study evaluated 893,658 major surgical operations from around the country from 2003 to 2007, and normalized the results for age, gender, income, geographic region, operation, and 30 background diseases.
Are there other moderates, or center right folk that support a single payer system or am I the only one?
And now....I'm going to kill your thread.....sorry....but this kind of stupidity needs to come to an end by having a close encounter with a stationary object.
Measuring health outcomes at the point of intervention If you really want to measure health outcomes, the best way to do it is at the point of medical intervention. If you have a heart attack, how long do you live in the U.S. vs. another country? If you’re diagnosed with breast cancer? In 2008, a group of investigators conducted a worldwide study of cancer survival rates, called CONCORD. They looked at 5-year survival rates for breast cancer, colon and rectal cancer, and prostate cancer. I compiled their data for the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, and western Europe. Guess who came out number one?
Cancer survival varies widely between countries. The CONCORD study provides survival estimates for 1·9 million adults (aged 15—99 years) diagnosed with a first, primary, invasive cancer of the breast (women), colon, rectum, or prostate during 1990—94 and followed up to 1999, by use of individual tumour records from 101 population-based cancer registries in 31 countries on five continents. This is, to our knowledge, the first worldwide analysis of cancer survival, with standard quality-control procedures and identical analytic methods for all datasets.
Yes, that's Lancet --- Britain's version of the prestigious American JAMA.
With respect to intellectual integrity and honesty...
FundingCenters for Disease Control and Prevention (Atlanta, GA, USA), Department of Health (London, UK), Cancer Research UK (London, UK).
...that's who funded the CONCORD Study.
The United States has the best health care in the world, bar none.
With the possible exception of France, who spends nearly as much money on Research & Development as the US does, the US has the best medical and pharmaceutical technology in existence.
By the way, from EuroStat data, the European Commission of the European Union....
UNIT Euro per inhabitant
ICHA_HC Research and development in health
GEO/TIME 2009
Denmark 2.38
Germany 41.18
Spain 10.33
France 116.86
Luxembourg 34.49
Romania 0.07
Slovakia 0.15
Sweden 27.45
Canada 95.92
United States 105.55
New Zealand 26.55
That's how much money the US spends on Research & Development per person.....just want people to see the true costs of health care.
But make no mistake about it, it costs money, and don't forget that Americans have really bizarre ideas about health, notwithstanding the fact that Americans also like to be pampered with things like cable/satellite TV in their private or semi-private rooms, and jacuzzi and on-demand movies and on-demand dining.
I know Liberals will throw an hissy fit, because, uh, you know, there's like facts on this thread now, and they don't know how to refute those facts so they'll just whine and cry with the standard cliches.
Okay, so my pain medication is starting to kick in and I'll leave you now before I face-plant into my [new] keyboard.
Try doing some real research on health care......you cannot solve a problem, unless you understand how the problem came to exist in the first place, so start with the history of your health care system.
Too bad most health economists don't agree with Mircea. No one seriously compares health care under Stalin with actual data. This is a classic case of a RWNJ arguing against the facts.
Plus, the data is in. The US pays more than twice as much as other industrialized countries, gets less access to health care, and receives less benefits.
All Micrea tries to do is obfuscate the data and fact with a mouthful of diarrhea. This is the same person who claimed that SS was not a successful at alleviating the poverty rate among seniors and it needs to be abolished.
Another Con who is trying to preserve the status quo, while fighting to weaken America's social safety nets, instead of trying to deliver HC at a lower value to all Americans.
My only questions for the obvious socialists on here who are promoting some kind of single payer health care or medicare/medicaid system...
What right do you have to demand to be able to stick your hand into the pocket of someone else, stealing from their earnings in order to pay for something you should be responsible to pay for yourself? Does the use of government rent seeking, forcing this theft through taxes make this theft legitimate? If it is so legitimate, why don't you bring your sorry ass over to my house and try to steal that amount from me in person? I promise you would no longer need any form of health care. All you would need is burial services, which I would provide to you for free.
When under the pretext of fraternity, the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gains from this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating.
Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
People are beginning to realize that the apparatus of government is costly. But what they do not know is that the burden falls inevitably on them.
Law cannot organize labor and industry without organizing injustice.
Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole—with their common aim of legal plunder—constitute socialism.
But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.
It is easy to understand why the law is used by the legislator to destroy in varying degrees among the rest of the people their personal independence by slavery, their liberty by oppression, and their property by plunder. This is done for the benefit of the person who makes the law, and in proportion to the power that he holds.
I owe NOTHING towards your life, health, housing, food, clothing, transportation, entertainment, telephone, electricity, internet access, etc. because I must PAY in order to obtain ANY and ALL of those desires for myself. I owe you NOTHING simply because you exist, EXCEPT protection for individual liberty and personal property, as these are the things I demand from you and everyone else. The reason I demand these things is because they are inalienable rights from GOD. As such you need do nothing in order for them to be granted by GOD. You can only affect these inalienable rights negatively by your actions of doing something. A person will still have these rights if you do nothing. In order for you to have a RIGHT to life, health, housing, food, clothing, transportation, entertainment, telephone, electricity, internet access, etc., someone else must do something (labor) to provide them for you. Therefore they are NOT rights granted by GOD. If you honestly think healthcare is a right, ask GOD to provide it for you. If it is a right, GOD will provide it. If it is not a right, you must demand from the labor and earnings of others in order to receive your supposed right. THAT is theft.
I personally am sick and tired of hearing you pathetic loser socialists demand you somehow have a RIGHT to a portion of another person's earnings. For if it really is your right to that which you have not earned, you should have no reservations at trying to reach into my pocket to partake of your self-claimed right to my property. For if it was your right, my personal property theft prevention devices (firearms) should cause you no discomfort at all.
However... If, in order for you to obtain THAT which you have not earned, you must use rent seeking methods, asking politicians to legalize the theft of another person's earnings, you in fact have much to fear. Those who are forced to labor, earn and pay for those who will not do the same will eventually have had enough and remove the worthless burden placed upon them... and YOU are that burden.
Apology accepted. Your crucifixion will be delayed 3 days accordingly.
What are the primary issues, and what handicap (mental or physical) prevents you from proposing issues that will address what you believe to be the "primary issues?"
Can you present evidence and facts showing how the health care system moved from the Free Market Economic System to its present Soviet-style Command Economic System?
Fine, I agree, and you can start by undoing all of the damage the American Hospital Association has caused over the last 79 years, starting with Obamacare.
Based on what facts?
The GOP needs to do the same......what, exactly? Embark on a campaign to reduce the population of the US from 315 Million to less than 9 Million so the US will be like the 25+ States in Europe that have populations of 9 Million or less?
From.... Delay, Denial and Dilution: The Impact of NHS Rationing on Heart Disease and Cancer
IEA Health and Welfare Unit
12% of kidney specialists in the UK said they had refused to treat patients due to limited resources (same source).
One study showed that patients accepted for dialysis stacked up this way.....
65 patients per million population UK
98 patients per million population in Canada
212 patients per million population in the US
Can you explain those numbers?
You want the good news or the bad news first?
I'll give you the good news: there's only 2 ways to explain it.
The bad news: both ways destroy any arguments for single-payer.
The first way to explain those numbers is how they statistically relate to population size.
The US, outnumbering Canada 10:1 in population would have a statistically high(er) rate of renal disease, and following from that, all other diseases and conditions as well. That means that the US cannot significantly reduce the cost of health care, which defeats the whole purpose of having single-payer.
The 2nd way to explain those numbers is that Americans are paying for the true cost of health care, and because they are, more people can receive dialysis treatment. That would also mean that the reason Canada and Britain have fewer patients, is because they ration health care. In other words you could do what other countries do.....spend less....but then spending less means denying care, or as the article says, delaying, denying and diluting care.
If you have problems with your kidneys, between Canada, Britain and the US, the best place to be is the US.
Okay, you have answered one of the questions I posed to you, "What are the primary issues...?"
You get a fail on that.
There are several ways to measure life-expectancy: from birth to death; from age 13 to death, and from age 65 to death.
Social Security --- from the day FDR nationalized the 30-odd State social security programs then in operation -- only uses life-expectancy from age 65 upward.
I'm going to use Table V.A3.—Period Life Expectancy on Page 90 of the 2012 Social Security Trustees' Report and give you the life-expectancy for people age 65 for male and female:
2011 Male 17.7 years; Female 20.0 years.
In English, a male in the US who reaches the age of 65 will most likely live another 17.7 years to the age of 82.7 years, while a female who reaches the age of 65 will on average live another 20 years to age 85.
Australian Life Expectancy: 81.4 (from Birth)
US Life-Expectancy from age 65: 82.7 years (Males) and 85 years (Females).
Statistically significant?
Nope. How horrible can the US health care system be if people who reach the age of 65 live longer?
Next debunking....who do I want to debunk the Infant Mortality Myth? Survey says: The United States Center for Disease Control....
The first thing you notice is that the US has a higher rate of neonatal deaths, and an equally disproportionate amount of NICU spending (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit). Why? Because health care in the US is worse and more expensive?
No. It is because health care in the US is both better and more aggressive.
US doctors go to heroic extreme extraordinary measures to save the life of an infant, while European doctors will not lift a finger. US doctors will spend $500,000 on a child that will be dead in a matter of days no matter what happens --- Europeans will not.
A great example is Hydranencephaly: a child born without a brain. In the US, doctors will do everything to keep that child alive; hooking it up to life support in NICU and taking other actions even though that child has absolutely no chance whatsoever of life. European doctors take no actions: they simply hand the child over to the mother and wait for it to die.
One of the things noted by MacDorman and Matthews....
....is that if the US adopted the Swedish Metric for births, then the US infant mortality rate would decline 33%.
Why? Because there is a difference between the US and Sweden as to how gestational period is calculated, making it appear that Sweden has lower Infant Mortality Rate, or that the US has an higher rate, even though neither is true.
Infant mortality also ignores important major cultural differences between the US and Europe.
The US has an extraordinarily higher rate of premature births. Nature intended prime-time child-bearing years to be the onset of menses through age 28, not age 35-50. The two largest groups for premature births are teens and older women. You don't see that in Europe, and because you don't, their Infant Mortality Rates are lower -- and it has nothing to do with health care....in fact just the opposite....it is health care that causes an higher Infant Mortality rate in the US due to the fact that US doctors are aggressive and take extraordinary measures while Europeans do not.
Europeans also classify and report premature births differently: a child weighing less than 1,000 grams who dies is listed as a fetal death, and so is not counted as a live birth. That is true even if the infant survives for a week or more and should be listed as a perinatal death, like they are in the US.
There's also the issue of viability. European countries are more likely to record a non-viable birth as a still-birth, whereas in the US it is recorded as a live birth and then doctors take heroic actions to save it.
There's a relationship between Infant Mortality and Life-Expectancy (from Birth). If the US adopted the same health care metrics as Sweden, then the US Infant Mortality Rate would decrease, and life-expectancy would increase....
...and it wouldn't cost you anything....except changing how your define fetal, peri-natal and neo-natal deaths.
Australia
Per capita expenditure per person: 3353
Healthcare cost as a % of GDP: 8.5
% of government revenue spent on healthcare: 17.7
And now...the same categoties for the United States:
Per capita expenditure per person: 7437
Healthcare cost as a % of GDP: 16
% of government revenue spent on healthcare: 18.5
That data isn't relevant.
Health Status, Health Care and Inequality: Canada vs. the U.S.
NBER Working Paper No. 13429 Issued in September 2007 NBER Program(s): HCHE
Does Canada's publicly funded, single payer health care system deliver better health outcomes and distribute health resources more equitably than the multi-payer heavily private U.S. system? We show that the efficacy of health care systems cannot be usefully evaluated by comparisons of infant mortality and life expectancy. We analyze several alternative measures of health status using JCUSH (The Joint Canada/U.S. Survey of Health) and other surveys. We find a somewhat higher incidence of chronic health conditions in the U.S. than in Canada but somewhat greater U.S. access to treatment for these conditions. Moreover, a significantly higher percentage of U.S. women and men are screened for major forms of cancer. Although health status, measured in various ways is similar in both countries, mortality/incidence ratios for various cancers tend to be higher in Canada. The need to ration resources in Canada, where care is delivered "free", ultimately leads to long waits. In the U.S., costs are more often a source of unmet needs. We also find that Canada has no more abolished the tendency for health status to improve with income than have other countries. Indeed, the health-income gradient is slightly steeper in Canada than it is in the U.S.
University of Pennsylvania
ScholarlyCommons
PSC Working Paper Series Population Studies Center
7-1-2009
Low Life Expectancy in the United States: Is the Health Care System at Fault?
By the way, the answer to the question is "No, it the Health Care System is not at Fault."
Why Medicaid is a Humanitarian Catastrophe
Last July, I wrote about a landmark study conducted at the University of Virginia that found that surgical patients on Medicaid are 13 percent more likely to die than those without insurance of any kind. The study evaluated 893,658 major surgical operations from around the country from 2003 to 2007, and normalized the results for age, gender, income, geographic region, operation, and 30 background diseases.
And now....I'm going to kill your thread.....sorry....but this kind of stupidity needs to come to an end by having a close encounter with a stationary object.
Measuring health outcomes at the point of intervention If you really want to measure health outcomes, the best way to do it is at the point of medical intervention. If you have a heart attack, how long do you live in the U.S. vs. another country? If you’re diagnosed with breast cancer? In 2008, a group of investigators conducted a worldwide study of cancer survival rates, called CONCORD. They looked at 5-year survival rates for breast cancer, colon and rectal cancer, and prostate cancer. I compiled their data for the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, and western Europe. Guess who came out number one?
Cancer survival varies widely between countries. The CONCORD study provides survival estimates for 1·9 million adults (aged 15—99 years) diagnosed with a first, primary, invasive cancer of the breast (women), colon, rectum, or prostate during 1990—94 and followed up to 1999, by use of individual tumour records from 101 population-based cancer registries in 31 countries on five continents. This is, to our knowledge, the first worldwide analysis of cancer survival, with standard quality-control procedures and identical analytic methods for all datasets.
Yes, that's Lancet --- Britain's version of the prestigious American JAMA.
With respect to intellectual integrity and honesty...
FundingCenters for Disease Control and Prevention (Atlanta, GA, USA), Department of Health (London, UK), Cancer Research UK (London, UK).
...that's who funded the CONCORD Study.
The United States has the best health care in the world, bar none.
With the possible exception of France, who spends nearly as much money on Research & Development as the US does, the US has the best medical and pharmaceutical technology in existence.
By the way, from EuroStat data, the European Commission of the European Union....
UNIT Euro per inhabitant
ICHA_HC Research and development in health
GEO/TIME 2009
Denmark 2.38
Germany 41.18
Spain 10.33
France 116.86
Luxembourg 34.49
Romania 0.07
Slovakia 0.15
Sweden 27.45
Canada 95.92
United States 105.55
New Zealand 26.55
That's how much money the US spends on Research & Development per person.....just want people to see the true costs of health care.
But make no mistake about it, it costs money, and don't forget that Americans have really bizarre ideas about health, notwithstanding the fact that Americans also like to be pampered with things like cable/satellite TV in their private or semi-private rooms, and jacuzzi and on-demand movies and on-demand dining.
I know Liberals will throw an hissy fit, because, uh, you know, there's like facts on this thread now, and they don't know how to refute those facts so they'll just whine and cry with the standard cliches.
Okay, so my pain medication is starting to kick in and I'll leave you now before I face-plant into my [new] keyboard.
Try doing some real research on health care......you cannot solve a problem, unless you understand how the problem came to exist in the first place, so start with the history of your health care system.
Conservatives for Common Sense...
Mircea
I read your post but I missed your suggestion for a solution to the problem.
Further on my last post: Thats why the GOP has next to no credibility on this issue. Romney and Ryan just bantered around about premium support but that does nothing to address rates. You can't just throw some cash at people and expect everything to fix itself. The tax structure that we have now distorts healthcare economics to the point that premium support wouldn't work to address rising costs which is the primary problem. Further...the population argument doesn't make a lot of sense because the healthcare would likely be handled at the state level, just as the Canadian system is handled at the provincial level. And yes our population is higher but that doesn't mean we have a finite revenue source...more people means tax dollars which means more physicians and resources for investment into healthcare technology.
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