Some great facts to add to an evidence-based discussion of the health care "crisis" and what, if anything, should be in "Obamacare".
I've been concerned for some time that there are problems with the American system of health care. However, I'm even more concerned that we might make the system worse in a rush to impose ideologically-based solutions to the health care problem. Let's take our time, try to work from a consensus on what the problem(s) even are, and then have an evidence-based discussion/analysis of the impact of various proposed solutions. It seems to me that the process in Washington right now is the antithesis of that.
Anyway, here is an article from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University that contains 10 facts about our health care system that I found very interesting. I've kept a bit of the discussion of some of the facts below, but follow the link above and read the whole thing.
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. ...
3. Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries. ...
4. Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians. ...
5. Lower-income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians. ...
6. Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the United Kingdom. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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.
The author's conclusion:
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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