Why Do Liberals Want To Trash Health Care?
The fact is that using every single metric, the US has the best health care on the planet.
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.
Wow this one is going to be easy. All I need to do is post something that isnt full of liberal BS and contorted facts and I get the best answer award! Thanks for the 10!
Ok the reason is the federal govt doesnt give a **** about health care. it is just another way to extort more money from americans and use it to hand out to the lazy that vote democrat. THey can actually give a raise to liberals that vote for them that way. I mean $3 TRILLION more dollars per year for hand outs? JACKPOT! Heres a clue. if you want something how about earning it? Has that idea ever crossed a democrats mind?
For every single fact you can find about how good American health care is, someone can find a counter-fact. Like infant mortality, amount of money per capita spent, number of people bankrupted because of medical emergencies, etc.
Not to mention that none of those facts have and sort of source.
If that’s true, why were we ranked 37th in the world?!
Secondly, not everyone who has cancer or some other disease will get treated for it, you wouldn’t believe some of the horror stories I’ve heard about how insurance agencies find some minor circumstance to deny people payment, it’s terrifying. For instance I’ve heard of a man (at a town hall meeting) who died of cancer because his insurance company found out he had gall stones. They found these AFTER they found the cancer, called it a preexisting condition and that was the end of him.
Some people DON’T have cancer.
Actually, you’ve pretty much just listed facts about cancer survival rates. That’s not “every single metric.”
For instance, when compared to many other industrialised countries the United States has an appaling adult mortality rate.
Canada is at seventy-two per one hundred thousand, UK is high around eighty and the United States ranks amongst the lowest scores of modern nations at almost one hundred and ten.
“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”
Where did you get this information from? We have a different statistic.
“…the majority (85%) of Canadians were very or somewhat satisfied with the health care services they received in 2005.”
You say “very satisfied”, but that isn’t everything. You are simply using manipulative terminology to warp the facts. The fact is that the vast majority of Canadians are content with their health care system.
Edit: Well my question about your information regarding the surveys wasn’t so much about verification of the information so much as the manner in which it is presented. Again, almost ninety percent of Canadians are satisfied with their treatment.
You should also remember that despite what the Hoover Press says, the United Nations World Health Organisation has ranked all of the countries you mentioned (with the exception of New Zealand) higher than the United States.
The article you listed portrays the US health care system as “better” by presenting a very narrow range of topics. When comparing stats in other areas, the United States lags behind the rest of the industrialised world (e.g. overall adult mortality rate, preventable deaths, infant mortality etc.)
You say America has the best health care system in the world but the only country you compare it to directly with any consistency is Canada. I guess that means Canada has the second best health care on the planet.
We spend much much more than the rest of the civilized world on health care but our life expectancies and overall health are lower than the majority of those countries. In something so complicated there will always be exceptions. You say we have better access to treatment and higher survival rates for cancer but don’t mention that we get cancer more often. The fact that we spend so much for access to technology but live shorter lives is a huge part of the problem. We spend like crazy for unnecessary treatments but don’t take simple, preventative steps. (you didn’t mention we are also the most medicated society on the planet, does that make us more sickly or mean we are over prescribed?)
We spend more per capita than any country you mentioned but according to the World Health Org. we have shorter less healthy lives.
Sure everyone that doesn’t agree whole heartedly is a “dumb butt monkey”. Only a twelve year old would quote one article on such a complicated issue then rip on people that don’t completely buy into their argument.