Posted on 03/16/2020 12:37:09 PM PDT by daniel1212
The Italian healthcare landscape includes crumbling hospitals, doctors trained on books rather than patients, and per capita spending one-third that of the United States. And Americans like to say their medical care is the best in the world, while Italians consider their National Health Service to be hopelessly dysfunctional. (In 2000 the World Health Organization ranked the Italian system second-best on the planet. But that stellar rating was based solely on equality of access on the one hand and health outcomes such as life expectancy on the other, ignoring any on-the-ground realities in between: waiting times, emergency room efficiency, surgical statistics, etc.)
But here’s the rub: Italians are much healthier than Americans in terms of everything from overall health longevity, infant mortality, obesity, cancer, diabetes, suicide, drug overdoses, homicides, and disability rates. On many of those measures, they beat out the UK as well. How on earth do they do it?
In Italy, a National Health System funded by taxes and based on the British model succeeds in providing everybody with doctors’ visits, medications, testing, and hospital care at virtually no out-of-pocket cost...
In Italy prices are kept down by hard bargaining – emergency room care is free for serious cases, those deworming pills cost one euro total, and even the classiest private hospital is unlikely to run more than €500 a night....
In the US, the world’s most unequal country, the average income of the top 10 percent is 19 times the average income in the bottom 10 percent; in Italy that ratio is only 11 to one, with the UK halfway in between.
And Italian labour laws ensure that new parents can take time off to bond with their children without losing their job, sick people don’t have to drag themselves back to work prematurely, and retirement doesn’t equal poverty.
The salubrious Italian lifestyle does the rest. Even educated, insured, well-off Americans are sicker than their peers in other rich nations. The local version of the Mediterranean diet may be the healthiest in the world – rich in fruits and vegetables, low in animal fats. And it’s low on snacks and desserts as well, so only 10 percent of Italians are obese, compared with 27 percent of Brits and a whopping 38 percent of Americans....
Susan Levenstein is an American doctor who has been practicing in Italy for the past 40 years.
THIS makes perfect sense! Good post.
Probably because they have to be!
True as in Cuba, and people in more rural places tend to get more exercise.
Absolutely nothing. They botched the diagnosis of JPII (who a few years after being shot had cancer), almost killed him with the surgery, and it had to be redone in a couple of years. And he was an important person ... the rest of the Italians get even worse.
The same is true of the Spanish health system, where everybody is pleading to go to a private facility. I’ve spent a lot of time in Spain and I know that from experience.
Is it any wonder that these two countries have the highest rates?
(Also, I have read that Italy, which was also having a regular seasonal flu outbreak going on, is misdiagnosing a lot of cases and just calling them Cornavirus.)
Read it: ; sounds like another America-deploring liberal elite savior. Yet, further site-searching on "America" finds her also stating this reveling insight from 2018:
Americans who knew something about Italy used to nod knowingly when I’d tell them the National Health Service was going from bad to worse,
Mario Monti.. installed to take over from Berlusconi as Prime Minister, who proceeded to force austerity with a vengeance on Italian regions in deficit, which meant most of them. Poof! there went the hospital beds, and the staffing, leaving patients amassed on gurneys in emergency room halls. Mario did more damage to ordinary Italians’ health care in one year than Silvio had in seventeen.
The right-wing League and the no-wing Five-Star Movement, the two parties currently – and improbably – sharing power, have made rosy joint promises to restore funding for the public medical sector, fight corruption, and improve services. Plus promising their constituents everything from earlier retirement to a guaranteed minimum income.
But it’s all pie in the sky, based on a magic trick....When they cobbled together a government, each party stuck to its own promises, despite the glaring contradiction between taking in less and spending more. - http://www.stethoscopeonrome.com/2018/12/warning-politics-may-be-bad-for-your.html
My Dad was a 21 year old private in the Army before the Spanish flu hit. He was serious injured in a training accident and had his upper back broken.
He ended up in the big Army hospital in Kansas. It turned out to be the one that was a major breeding ground for the Spanish Flu.
His older brother and his wife drove up to visit my Dad. Then they went home. A couple of days later, his brother got sick from the flu and died in about one day. He had never been sick in his life.
My Dad survived the flu and was later discharged. He felt that the nurses/medics saved his life by putting his bed and him outside in the sun. Most of those, who stayed inside the big hospital tents, died from the flu.
As I have posted before: Daily, get out in the sun and walk if you can for 30 minutes a day. That is Nature’s way of increasing your vitamin D levels and Dopamine levels.
The higher Dopamine levels will help you to feel better.
https://medium.com/@ra.hobday/coronavirus-and-the-sun-a-lesson-from-the-1918-influenza-pandemic-509151dc8065 Coronavirus and the Sun:
A lesson from the 1918 Influenza Pandemic . Put simply, medics found that severely ill flu patients nursed outdoors recovered better than those treated indoors. A combination of fresh air and sunlight seems to have prevented deaths among patients; and infections among medical staff.
`Open-Air’ Treatment in 1918 During the great pandemic, two of the worst places to be were military barracks and troop-ships. Overcrowding and bad ventilation put soldiers and sailors at high risk of catching influenza and the other infections that often followed it.[2,3] As with the current Covid-19 outbreak, most of the victims of so-called `Spanish flu’ did not die from influenza: they died of pneumonia and other complications.
This is the Bernie Sander’s health care he wants for America.
IOW, 20,000 known Chinese people with legal Chinese citizenship, in Milan. They are centered in the textile/clothing/fashion industry. There is a LOT of travel and commerce back and forth between Milan and China, as well as a lot of circulation amongst Chinese communities in Italy ----large numbers in Rome, and Prato (in Tuscany) as well as somewhat smaller numbers in Turin and Florence.
How this related to the Coronavius epidemic is yet to be explored.
Milan is one of Italy’s top demographic hubs for Chinese: there are officially about 20,000 Chinese in Milan, NOT COUNTING those who have come illegally, and China-born people who are now Italian citizens.
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Yes and I think the official number is even higher than 20K. I think it’s 60K not including illegals.
And that article was posted: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3824896/posts?page=8
She attacks Trum. But also see post 25
Pretty much the same situation with my friend. He was self-conscious about his credentials, so after a few years of general family practice, he shut down his practice and was accepted into a graduate program at a prestigious medical school here in the US and turned out to be an exceptional specialist in his field.
What they want is nothing on the political shelf but their power acquiring programs./
Maybe this woman should realize that Italy is ungovernable including their healthcare system. Mussolini had to kill a lot of them and then partner with hitler to get them to behave. I refuse to accept our healthcare is worse than theirs despite the Mediterranean diet.
” And Americans like to say their medical care is the best in the world...”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I broke my collar bone ( clavicle ) 5 weeks ago. It was badly shattered. A week after surgery, I received a thank you note from the all the nurses and staff who assisted me.
I bet they don’t do that in Italy.
“infant mortality”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Plenty of room for manipulating stats on that one. In the U.S. we try to save the tiniest of premature babies.
Ah yes, Comrade Sanders.
SOCILAIZED MEDICINE DONT WORK
Although many claim a right to dispose of such like they were a mere growth of flesh as long as they are yet inside the womb.
I decided to try to find out what this progressive paragon of medical practice was doing today. Was she in Italy trying to save her patients? Had she already died heroically doing just that, and I was being unfair to her?
Nope. Skedaddled out of Italy the first week of March to go to conferences in the US. And now, oh golly, she is stuck in the US and can’t get back to Italy, where the health care is so much better than here:
http://www.stethoscopeonrome.com/2020/03/notes-from-coronavirus-refugee.html
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