First of all thank you for doing me the courtesy of actually answering the premise of my last post. Sadly enough this isn't nearly as common as 1 might expect. Now for your facts. I will go over them 1 by one. What I do notice is that most of them seem to cherry pick data favorable to the US. Nothing wrong with that, everybody does it, but I will point it out when I see it.
10 Surprising Facts about American Health Care
Brief Analyses | Health
No. 649
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
by Scott Atlas
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 alike are beating the drum for a far larger government rôle in health care. Much of the public assumes their arguments are sound because the calls for change are so ubiquitous and the topic so complex. However, before turning to government as the solution, some unheralded facts about America's health care system should be considered.
Fact No. 1: Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers.[1] 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 U.K. and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.
Fact No. 2: Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians.[2] Breast cancer mortality is 9 percent higher, prostate cancer is 184 percent higher and colon cancer mortality among men is about 10 percent higher than in the United States.
Fact No. 3: Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries.[3] Some 56 percent of Americans who could benefit are taking statins, which reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease. 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.
Fact No. 4: Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians.[4] Take the proportion of the appropriate-age population groups who have received recommended tests for breast, cervical, prostate and colon cancer:
Fact No. 5: Lower income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians. Twice as many American seniors with below-median incomes self-report "excellent" health compared to Canadian seniors (11.7 percent versus 5.8 percent). Conversely, white Canadian young adults with below-median incomes are 20 percent more likely than lower income Americans to describe their health as "fair or poor."[5]
- Nine of 10 middle-aged American women (89 percent) have had a mammogram, compared to less than three-fourths of Canadians (72 percent).
- Nearly all American women (96 percent) have had a pap smear, compared to less than 90 percent of Canadians.
- More than half of American men (54 percent) have had a PSA test, compared to less than 1 in 6 Canadians (16 percent).
- Nearly one-third of Americans (30 percent) have had a colonoscopy, compared with less than 1 in 20 Canadians (5 percent).
- See more at: 10 Surprising Facts about American Health Care
Fact No. 6: Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the U.K. Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long - sometimes more than a year - to see a specialist, to have elective surgery like hip replacements or to get radiation treatment for cancer.[6] All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada.[7] In England, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.[8]
Fact No. 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."[9]
Fact No. 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 to only 41.5 percent of Canadians; a lower proportion of Americans are dissatisfied (6.8 percent) than Canadians (8.5 percent).[10]
Fact No. 9: Americans have much better access to important new technologies like medical imaging than patients in Canada or the U.K. Maligned as a waste by economists and policymakers naïve to actual medical practice, an overwhelming majority of leading American physicians identified computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the most important medical innovations for improving patient care during the previous decade.[11] [See the table.] The United States has 34 CT scanners per million Americans, compared to 12 in Canada and eight in Britain. The United States has nearly 27 MRI machines per million compared to about 6 per million in Canada and Britain.[12]
Fact No. 10: Americans are responsible for the vast majority of all health care innovations.[13] The top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other single developed country.[14] Since the mid-1970s, the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology has gone to American residents more often than recipients from all other countries combined.[15] In only five of the past 34 years did a scientist living in America not win or share in the prize. Most important recent medical innovations were developed in the United States.[16] [See the table.]
Conclusion. Despite serious challenges, such as escalating costs and the uninsured, the U.S. health care system compares favorably to those in other developed countries.
- See more at: 10 Surprising Facts about American Health Care
1. This compares the US in certain well specified cancers to certain individual countries. This is what you call cherry picking data. I haven't taken the time to check on the validity of those facts, and I assume they are correct, but it is very easy to skew data to what you want to prove if you pick and choose what data you are gonna use. ALL CANCERS DEATH RATE BY COUNTRY This seems a more honest comparison it gives death rates of all cancers per 100000 people and the US scores average at best.
2. The link provided shows Canada scoring better on cancer mortality rate, underscoring my cherry picking data point.
3. Why, pray tell does it make a point of mentioning only statins and jumps to the conclusion that the US is better at preventing chronic diseases because of it. To make a broad sweeping statement on the back of a single use of medicine seems quite a jump.
4. This is a bit trickier for me because I can't find a global statistic of the lvl of cancer screenings, just some countries, on the other hand it's exactly the same story as your first point, namely comparing certain tests in only 2 countries. Furthermore this link even casts in doubt the effectiveness on these screenings. I don't personally agree but I want to put it out there. Crunching Numbers: What Cancer Screening Statistics Really Tell Us
5. Citing surveys as a reliable way of judging quality in 2 countries is pretty dubious but for the hell of it I went to the actual source cited by your article and some weird things popped up. First of this article cites a comparison by Canada and the US but it actually is a comparison including 7 countries. And the survey turns bleak in a lot of the questions asked for the American people. It rates the care good but when asked for specifics in most cases, ALL countries in the survey do better. It's cheaper and care is more accessible in the other countries.Toward Higher-Performance Health Systems: Adults’ Health Care Experiences In Seven Countries, 2007 this is the website cited as the source by your article.
6. This might be true in the countries cited in Belgium however waiting periods are pretty reasonable and even immediate in the cases it is considered life threatening or necessary for other reason ( chance of disability if not acted upon), something I know from personal experience isn't true in your country.
7. Cites the same source as point 5 and as I already pointed out the data taken from that source is taken out highly out of context.
8. See point 5 and 7
9. The fact that something is available more doesn't necessarily mean it is more available. I have had 5 MRI's and MMI's in my life and I didn't have to pay for them, can you claim the same.
10. I do not deny that at the high end American medicine is unsurpassed. I do claim that the high end of American medicine is unavailable to most of the populace due to financial constraints. As to your second point. The article is very specific to cite, residents not citizens. Meaning that a lot of these people had their education elsewhere.
