Health Care Pie-in-the-Sky meets Reality: Walgreens in WA won't accept Medicaid

[makattak]

Mak,

The Government pays, but no one is required to take it.  That's the point - it's still a private business making a decision about what it's going to accept, which is the point of this article.

Also, instead of summary articles, try to post an article with stats (like the one I posted) on your measures - I think you'll have a very hard time finding any hard data sets that show the US ahead in either infant mortality or general cancer survival.  For example, here's some data that says the opposite of what your articles claim:

http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Content/Performance-Snapshots/International-Comparisons/International-Comparison--Effectiveness.aspx

Umm... your stats come from an organization promoting government health care. I don't see the study, nor do I see the actual statistics. They posted numbers.


If you'd have clicked the link, you'd have noted it cited a CDC Report. Real statistics there and not from a partisan organization.

[makattak]

As for cancer, here's an article from the British Oncology journal Lancet Oncology:

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:Xq1T-cWgobsJ:healthcare.procon.org/sourcefiles/CONCORDCancerSurvivalStudy.pdf+Cancer+survival+in+five+continents:+a+worldwide+population-based+study&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjLjbFtuK_2tMNmBcE_nWKtgoHDWWyTIwD5kx6oeJXDXdPPNpulXz15kYppWZHbhIkpF7mALxZ--Ay881YkOLIIvwWP9yLokJrD0JepjDjOmO1den_bBdtW9ThK4yDNNwn3xPzQ&sig=AHIEtbQj67LmngevVM3s6YMlFTiakx0lKw

Statistics straight from the source. US is better than every other country in almost every category of cancer survival. (And those few exceptions, it's very close.)

Many it is SIGNIFICANTLY better, as in 20% better.

[roo_ster]

De Selby:

I hate to pile on(0), what with mak furnishing Brit-sourced & US Gov't-sourced data to slap silly the notion that health-specific outcomes are improved under socialized medicine.

Let us look at that whole "longer life expectancy under socialized medicine" deal a bit more closely.  if you scroll up, you'll see the 2009 numbers from the CIA Factbook about life expectancy around the world.  I stopped when I got to the USA, but that excerpt ought to be good enough.

For 2009, the life expectancy for the USA is 78.11 years.  If we tool up the list, we get to the UK, which has had socialized medicine since they gave Churchill the boot in 1945 or so.  So after 65 years of socialized medicine(1), extortionate taxes, the crushing of medical innovation, the mean UK life expectancy is (drum roll, please) 79.01 years.  Let me do the math for you: that is 0.9 years difference in the UK's favor.

That is a 1.15% increase over the USA's life expectancy.  Sixty-five. Years.  Of socialized medicine. They got a 1.15% boost, less than a year.  Anyone wanna do a cost-benefit analysis on that?

Also, we need to clarify.  The "life expectancy" we have been writing about of is "mean life expectancy at birth."

But, again, what about all those pesky differences between countries: murder rates, auto accidents, etc? 

In The Business of Health, Robert Ohsfeldt and John Schneider factor out intentional and unintentional injuries from life-expectancy statistics and find that Americans who don’t die in car crashes or homicides outlive people in any other Western country.

Huh.

[Note, this guy is using 2004-2006 data sourced from US & UK gov'ts--jfruser]
It's true that life expectancy is higher at birth in the U.K., by 1.7 years for males and .90 years for females, but life expectancy at older ages is greater in the U.S. than in the U.K. For men, life expectancy is greater at birth and up until age 60 in the U.K., but then the pattern reverses and men can expect to live longer in the U.S. at ages 65, 70, 75, 80 and 85. By age 75, male life expectancy is greater than in the U.K. by at least six months. Likewise, U.K. women have higher life expectancy at birth and up until age 55; at ages 60 and above, American women have greater life expectancy than their U.K. counterparts, and by age 75 women live longer in the U.S. than in the U.K. by 8-9 months.

Since quality health care (surgery, treatment, critical care, advanced testing, expensive prescription drugs) is most important during the last years of our lives, couldn't we say that the U.S. has a first-rate health care system, especially at the time when quality care is most important, and it extends the lives of older people in U.S. by at least 1/2 year?

Here's a link to a large image of his spreadsheet:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_otfwl2zc6Qc/SoB75JJD1dI/AAAAAAAAK2Y/56495T9JqJA/s1600-h/UKUSLife.bmp


De Selby, you may want and believe socialized medicine to be a wonderful thing better than a free market approach or what we have had in the USA (2).  The problem is, in the realm of reason & fact this is disprovable...and has been shown as bunk.  In the end, your belief is faith-based.  And you would impose your faith on all of us with the gov't's claimed monopoly on legitimate violence.


(0)  Oh, who am I kidding?  I love piling on statist propaganda with hard data and blowing it out of the water.

(1)  Assuming the difference is 100% due to socialized medicine

(2) Not free market, what with gov't spending $0.40  of every health care dollar and distorting the market with that & other regulation.

[Monkeyleg]

That point about elderly people in the US living longer is interesting. I wonder if it has anything to do with the additional stress that US workers (probably) have over their UK counterparts, such that some US citizens die a bit earlier from heart attacks, etc, but those who don't live longer.

[Tallpine]

i just had to add, if a patient can't afford to pay cash the doctor should be allowed to negotiate with them and take whatever they can pay the doctor wants.

I built a pole fence for our doctor when our twins were born 

[cassandra and sara's daddy]

i take eggs and power washed mines house.  built a deck for the one who delivered kid 2  and he owed mr after that