Very interesting article, showing how desperately bad the current US health care system is. It is so bad that 101,000 people have died needlessly in the past year. these were preventable deaths, if folks had access to good health care,
France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday.
If the U.S. health care system performed as well as those of those top three countries, there would be 101,000 fewer deaths in the United States per year, according to researchers writing in the journal Health Affairs.
Researchers Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine tracked deaths that they deemed could have been prevented by access to timely and effective health care, and ranked nations on how they did.
They called such deaths an important way to gauge the performance of a country’s health care system.
Every one of the countries that ranked head and shoulders above the US have Universal Health Care*
The lack of access to good health care has effected a great number of women.
In establishing their rankings, the researchers considered deaths before age 75 from numerous causes, including heart disease, stroke, certain cancers, diabetes, certain bacterial infections and complications of common surgical procedures.
Such deaths accounted for 23 percent of overall deaths in men and 32 percent of deaths in women, the researchers said.
I believe the fact that women are grossly underpaid that they are more likely not to be able to afford health insurance. In addition, many “basic” coverage plans do not cover many of the necessary, but women-only, health concerns (i.e. pregnancy).
While the killing off of people disturbs me, and that women’s lives appear to matter very little, what is truly disturbing is that 10 years ago, the US ranked 15th in the same/similar survey, and was the ONLY country to drop in the rankings!
The researchers compared these rankings with rankings for the same 19 countries covering the period of 1997 and 1998. France and Japan also were first and second in those rankings, while the United States was 15th, meaning it fell four places in the latest rankings.
All the countries made progress in reducing preventable deaths from these earlier rankings, the researchers said. These types of deaths dropped by an average of 16 percent for the nations in the study, but the U.S. decline was only 4 percent.
In other words, as money-driven medicine expanded, our health care access and effectiveness declined. This exemplifies why our current system does not work, and shows us results of why universal health care does work.
*as opposed to universal health care coverage.
As a Canadian, I do not want to see the USA get universal health care or free universal education.
Much of Canada’s increasing economic advantage comes from the malaise and stupidity of directly competing demographic areas in the USA; and we are winning because of our healthcare and educational advantages.
Recently, Toyota chose Ontario Canada over Alabama as a site for their largest manufacturing site.
Why?
Toyota cited a much more highly educated workforce and the savings in healthcare costs as the deciding factors in choosing Canada.
Please keep your present system in the USA — it’s “Merkan, so it’s gotta be the ‘best’!
