Poor healthcare may shorten American lives: study (health care, suspect, death)

[SLCPUNK]

In June, the Commonwealth Fund, which advocates on and does research focusing on healthcare reform, reported that Americans spend twice as much on healthcare as residents of other developed countries -- $7,290 per person -- but get lower quality and less efficiency.
Muennig and Sherry Glied compared the United States to Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. All these countries provide universal health insurance, in contrast to the United States, where 15 percent of the population lacks health insurance, although healthcare reform passed in March is designed to lower that disparity.

Americans die sooner than citizens of a dozen other developed nations and the usual suspects -- obesity, traffic accidents and a high murder rate -- are not to blame, researchers reported on Thursday. Instead, poor healthcare may be to blame, the team at Columbia University in New York reported. They found that 15-year survival rates for men and women aged 45 to 65 have fallen in the United States relative to the other 12 countries over the past 30 years.

"In 1950, the United States was fifth among the leading industrialized nations with respect to female life expectancy at birth, surpassed only by Sweden, Norway, Australia, and the Netherlands," they wrote. At last count, the United States was 46th in female life expectancy; 49th for both sexes.

Poor healthcare may shorten American lives: study - Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20101007/hl_nm/us_usa_death - broken link)

[stillkit]

Wow! Who would've guessed that poor health care can shorten your life?

I wonder how many of our tax dollars they spent figuring that out?

[nmnita]

you need to understand how all these studies work. They are not as simple as they appear.

Nita