Ten Reasons America Has the World’s Best Health Care System

I don’t know if any of you have seen this already, but Scott Atlas at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University recently wrote a very informative essay titled “Ten reasons why America’s health care system is in better condition than you might suppose” which simply consists of the prefix and 10 facts about America’s current health care system. What makes it most effective is that the essay’s focus is on the comparison of other countries to America.

Next time you get into a debate with somebody who is hoping for a government takeover of health care, be sure you forward them this list and remind them that there are repercussions of individuals’ governmental over-dependence, and those repercussions include the loss of our liberties’ of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

~ Becky~

MEDICINE AND HEALTH:
Here’s a Second Opinion
By Scott W. Atlas

Ten reasons why America’s health care system is in better condition than you might suppose. By Scott W. Atlas.
http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/49525427.html

Medical care in the United States is derided as miserable compared to health care systems in the rest of the developed world. Economists, government officials, insurers, and academics beat the drum for a far larger government role in health care. Much of the public assumes that their arguments are sound because the calls for change are so ubiquitous and the topic so complex. Before we turn to government as the solution, however, we should consider some unheralded facts about America’s health care system.

1. Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers. Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.

2. Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians. Breast cancer mortality in Canada is 9 percent higher than in the United States, prostate cancer is 184 percent higher, and colon cancer among men is about 10 percent higher.

3. Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries. Some 56 percent of Americans who could benefit from statin drugs, which reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease, are taking them. By comparison, of those patients who could benefit from these drugs, only 36 percent of the Dutch, 29 percent of the Swiss, 26 percent of Germans, 23 percent of Britons, and 17 percent of Italians receive them.

4. Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians. Take the proportion of the appropriate-age population groups who have received recommended tests for breast, cervical, prostate, and colon cancer:

Nine out of ten middle-aged American women (89 percent) have had a mammogram, compared to fewer than three-fourths of Canadians (72 percent).
Nearly all American women (96 percent) have had a Pap smear, compared to fewer than 90 percent of Canadians.
More than half of American men (54 percent) have had a prostatespecific antigen (PSA) test, compared to fewer than one in six Canadians (16 percent).
Nearly one-third of Americans (30 percent) have had a colonoscopy, compared with fewer than one in twenty Canadians (5 percent).

5. Lower-income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians. Twice as many American seniors with below-median incomes self-report “excellent” health (11.7 percent) compared to Canadian seniors (5.8 percent). Conversely, white, young Canadian adults with below-median incomes are 20 percent more likely than lower-income Americans to describe their health as “fair or poor.”

6. Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the United Kingdom. Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long—sometimes more than a year—to see a specialist, have elective surgery such as hip replacements, or get radiation treatment for cancer. All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada. In Britain, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.

7. People in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed. More than 70 percent of German, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and British adults say their health system needs either “fundamental change” or “complete rebuilding.”

8. Americans are more satisfied with the care they receive than Canadians. When asked about their own health care instead of the “health care system,” more than half of Americans (51.3 percent) are very satisfied with their health care services, compared with only 41.5 percent of Canadians; a lower proportion of Americans are dissatisfied (6.8 percent) than Canadians (8.5 percent).

9. Americans have better access to important new technologies such as medical imaging than do patients in Canada or Britain. An overwhelming majority of leading American physicians identify computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the most important medical innovations for improving patient care during the previous decade—even as economists and policy makers unfamiliar with actual medical practice decry these techniques as wasteful. The United States has thirty-four CT scanners per million Americans, compared to twelve in Canada and eight in Britain. The United States has almost twenty-seven MRI machines per million people compared to about six per million in Canada and Britain.

10. Americans are responsible for the vast majority of all health care innovations. The top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other developed country. Since the mid- 1970s, the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology has gone to U.S. residents more often than recipients from all other countries combined. In only five of the past thirty-four years did a scientist living in the United States not win or share in the prize. Most important recent medical innovations were developed in the United States.

Despite serious challenges, such as escalating costs and care for the uninsured, the U.S. health care system compares favorably to those in other developed countries.

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Comment by Fang1944 on October 8, 2009 at 5:48pm

Comment by Fang1944 on October 8, 2009 at 8:35am: Well, there's hope. Even Bob Dole has come out and said that the GOP should get on board with health care reform.

Comment by matt nichols on October 8, 2009 at 12:25am: Thanks Fang, i just get irate because people are making the healthcare debate an issue of Conservatives vs Liberals. It's a shame something so important is being fought over by the red vs blue, it's too important for that, a compromise where the uninsured become insured is the answer and the politics needs to be removed from the issue, you can be a Republican and still believe in healthcare for everyone. Taking away a persons right to live is deadly ground that shouldn't be tread upon without a lot of concern.

I also hate when people insinuate that what the rich in our country have now will eventually trickle down to us, it's healthcare, not maple syrup. If you use an analogy like that the more accurate way to look at it would be like water, we can only wait for it for so long before we die of thirst.

Comment by Fang1944 on October 6, 2009 at 9:20am: Hang in there, Matt. A lot of us are pulling for you. And thank you for your service.

Comment by matt nichols on October 6, 2009 at 1:42am: So I do a little searching around on Scott Atlas

This entire article can be viewed here

NCPA? Really, this isn't an unbiased or subjective source. It's a conservative think tank. Not a credable source since they are mining data to reach a conclusion. Wrong, wrong and more wrong

from Wikipedia
The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) is an American non-profit conservative think tank.[1] The NCPA states that its goal is to develop and promote private alternatives to government regulation and control, solving problems by relying on the strength of the competitive, entrepreneurial private sector. Topics include reforms in health care, taxes, Social Security, welfare, education and environmental regulation.

Comment by matt nichols on October 6, 2009 at 1:32am: You can't cherry pick statistics to try and prove a point. You have to conduct unbiased research and draw a conclusion.

I would honestly rather hear about what our nation plans to do about the 40 million uninsured/under-insured. I'm a veteran from the current war and the only health care I have is the VA, I'm uninsurable because I'm paralyzed and in a wheelchair. That is American healthcare. Our health care leaves people behind and we let Americans (including veterans) die by the thousands every year for lack of healthcare. You should be ashamed of yourself for supporting corporate healthcare, we need a change and we need it now. If you don't like whats on the table then come up with something!

If you are going to bash people trying to make a change (a change that's needed) then at least come up with an alternate plan because what he have now is a disgrace and embarrassing to all Americans.

You can't just make a comment about who has how many MRI machines, maybe they use theirs twice as much? Back up your data with a source also, any source please, don't just say something and have nothing to back yourself up.

So if our healthcare is so great how come the disabled American veteran writing this comment has no healthcare and will never have healthcare without a change? Are you OK with that? Do we still have such a great healthcare system?

Here's an example of cherry picking like what you did....

1- Death from cancer (most recent)
United States: 321.9 deaths per 100,000 people
United Kingdom: 253.5 deaths per 100,000 people

2- Child maltreatment deaths (most recent)
United States: 2.2 per 100,000 children
United Kingdom: 0.4 per 100,000 children

3- Expenditure per capita > current US$ (most recent)
United States: 6,096.2 $
United Kingdom: 2,899.7 $

Anyways, it just goes to show you can make any data look like whatever you want it too. The data has to be analyzed by experts and even then it isn't guarantied to be precise. Most experts in healthcare whom accompany their research with educations in fields specializing in the data at hand say the US has an awful healthcare system and we do. Just because some hack says something in a book doesn't even mean he knows what he's talking about. Sorry but these things are so complex that experts in the particular field is a requirement for reasonable analysis.

For example congress has passed legislation under Reagan (yup a Republican) that requires a hospital to ensure you can do the following before dumping you out the back door...

* Breath
* Feed yourself
* Have mobility
* Dress yourself
* Take care of Personal hygiene
* Able to use the bathroom (might not seem important, but ask a paraplegic about this sometime because it is important)
* Medicating
* Communicate

We actually have to pass laws in this country to insure that an ER makes sure you are breathing before discharging you? WTF? So we have a choice in this country, we can go bankrupt (things stay as they are), we can let people who can't pay die in the streets (like some 3rd world countries do) or we can make a change to something different, something better.

http://www.nationmaster.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_and_Active_Labor_Act#See_also
http://www.emtala.com/history.htm

Comment by Fang1944 on September 29, 2009 at 2:36pm

Comment by Fang1944 on September 29, 2009 at 1:53pm: Nobody doubts that we have good hospitals and doctors. The problem is that a lot of people can't pay for medical care. Just read an article about a woman who has decided to go blind because her health insurance won't pay for treating her hereditary blindness and that of her daughters who have the same hereditary condition.

I can remember being injured on a summer job and having no money (penniless college student) and no insurance from my employer (the great state of Texas). I was lucky: the surgeon who worked on me was a good egg and only charged me a month of my income at that time.

And there are tens of thousands of stories like these, tens of thousands of people dying because they don't have insurance. That's what health care reform is about. Going on about "Our doctors are wonderful" is just misdirection.

Comment by Michael F. Ortiz on September 29, 2009 at 12:05pm: The System Works...there are those that seem to serve themselves rather than the populus of people in America {congressmen, etc. mind yu}...It would appear to me that this DEMOCRACY's System of "Checks and Balaces" would work efficiently for AMERICA provided Americans would take it upon themselves to be Educated (if they would keep up with "CURENT EVENTS")

Comment by Van on September 16, 2009 at 10:30am: Seems this study has been shot down for cherrypicking data and also saying thins that aren't true. For another viewpoint: http://www.1payer.net/pdf/News-and-Blogs/spurious-health-reform-facts-rebuttal.pdf
An excerpt:
Fact 1” claims that Americans have much higher survival rates for cancer of the breast, prostate and colon than their counterparts in Germany, the U.K and Norway. “Fact 2” claims that Americans have lower mortality from breast and colon cancer than Canadians. However, as described in some detail in my most recent book The Cancer Generation: Baby Boomers Facing a Perfect Storm, these conclusions are based on five-year survival rates, a flawed method of evaluating outcomes. Although the five-year survival rates for Americans are higher for all cancers in this country compared with both men and women in Europe, researchers tell us that these figures are deceptive and incorrect because of several kinds of bias. For example, the study used by Atlas has no information on clinical stage of cancers. For valid cross-national comparisons, patients have to be matched for stage, since advanced-stage cancers will obviously have worse outcomes than early-stage cancers. There are other technical but crucial kinds of bias which have to be accounted for before drawing conclusions that we do better than other countries. The NCPA’s “facts” did not consider other sources of bias, such as how much screening was done in each country, and are biased to a political conclusion that fits with its agenda.
Another excerpt:
A 2008 report by the Commonwealth Fund found that the U.S. dropped from

15th in 2006 to last among 19 countries in 2008 on a measure of mortality that

is amenable to medical care. (7)

• A 2007 report ranked the U.S. 42nd in the world for life expectancy, lower than

most of Europe and Japan. (8)

• A 2006 study found that Americans in late middle age are less healthy than

their counterparts in England for cancer and five other chronic diseases. (9)

• A 2007 study found that Canada has at least the quality of care as in the U.S.,

often with better outcomes, despite spending little more than one-half what we

spend on health care. (10)