LOTT'S NUMBERS: Comparing American Health Care to Other Countries

We spend one-and-a-half times more per person on health care than any other country, but we aren't any healthier for it.

-- President Obama in his address to a joint session of Congress on health care on September 9, 2009.

If you were seriously ill, what country would you want to be in? That seems like the simple question for comparing health care in different countries. But the numbers being offered by the administration aren't any more useful in answering that question than they were about comparing the cost of health care across countries. . . .

The comparison of what we spend on health care with other countries evades me. (and truthfully, you will have to show me how we are less healthy.)

What is the comparison between the US and other nations in housing, groceries, cell phones, etc...

Why should we bring our standard of living down to the level of other countries?

I might go for it (NOT) if our illustrious, elite ruling Critters are willing to go along to the path of scrimping and saving. If it affects the general population..it should affect them as well.

The “Let them eat cake” attitude infuriates me.

Let me offer this analysis of how success comes to German health care. First, if you make more than $60k a year (more or less)...you avoid this mandatory requirement and do your own arrangement.

Second, the pharmacy and drug industry are tightly controlled and in cases, you are forced by economics to buy German-made drugs (even if they logically cost more) because of the rules. You also end up with a majority of generic drugs issued rather than the actual “real” stuff.

Then we come to doctors. You basically arrange four rooms and your two nurses hustle through 44 patients in the morning as fast as they can. If lucky, a patient gets probably four minutes of actual doctor attention...and then a pass to the specialist or a order to the nurse or a prescription. The price of a visit to your local doctor is very reasonable, but he isn’t going to profit of you.

Nurses? Their salaries are tightly controlled and most by age 45...are making 60 percent of what an American nurse with a 4-year degree makes. They are unhappy about this and most are thinking about leaving the country.

Hospitals are old and in need of massive overhaul, but they don’t make the profit to do anything so they end up painting the rooms and some places look like a place in the 1960s.

Germany makes this work...but there are massive issues behind their success...which they can’t fix or improve anything.

“Even America’s relatively high rate of infant mortality has a lot to do with behavioral differences, including alcohol and drug use.”

Infant mortality rate is often used to prove that healthcare is the US is not as good as elsewhere, but it is not a useful comparison because in other countries many infants are counted as stillbirths which in the US are saved by extraordinary accomplishments. Babies not of specified weight, length, gestational period, or those that do not survive for a certain time are not counted as live births.

For four of the types of cancer (Colon, prostate, Cervical, and Thyroid), the better the WHO rating for various countries, the lower was the cancer survival rate (Figure 1). This weird result suggests that the WHO measures have little to do with measuring what health care makes people better.

Weird also describes whatever hidden political agendas these global busybodies are enabling.

We’re at the top of the charts for obesity and major car accidents.

To equate medical care with “health” is a false and misleading comparison, to use longevity as a measure of medical care is also false - and Obama knows it.

When will all of America wise up to his cold manipulation?

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