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Ten reasons why America’s health care system is in better condition than you might suppose.
Hoover Institution, Stanford ^ | 03/24/2009 | Scott W. Atlas

Posted on 08/03/2009 12:05:35 PM PDT by iowamark

Medical care in the United States is derided as miserable compared to health care systems in the rest of the developed world. Economists, government officials, insurers, and academics beat the drum for a far larger government role in health care. Much of the public assumes that their arguments are sound because the calls for change are so ubiquitous and the topic so complex. Before we turn to government as the solution, however, we should consider some unheralded facts about America’s health care system.

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.

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.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: healthcarereform
Scott W. Atlas is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of radiology and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical School.
1 posted on 08/03/2009 12:05:35 PM PDT by iowamark
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To: iowamark

most surprising: Lower-income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians.

I thought improving medical care for the little guys was a centerpiece of the proposed legislation. Sounds like we’re doing pretty good here.


2 posted on 08/03/2009 12:12:18 PM PDT by frposty (I'm a simpleton)
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To: iowamark
. 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.

The only reason that Canada's numbers aare lower than their european counterparts is because Canadians can, and do, cross the border to the US for treatment in massive numbers once they recieve a cancer diagnosis.

3 posted on 08/03/2009 12:15:17 PM PDT by pgkdan ( I miss Ronald Reagan!)
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To: iowamark
I'm just an ordinary guy (not rich,powerful or "connected") who had a hip replacement last year.From the moment I placed the call to the surgeon's office for the initial consultation/evaluation it was about 6 weeks until I was actually *on the operating table*.And it would have been sooner than that if I had been more flexible regarding the scheduling of the pre-op MRI.

That's all I need to know.

4 posted on 08/03/2009 12:21:21 PM PDT by Gay State Conservative (Christian+Veteran=Terrorist)
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To: iowamark

bkmk


5 posted on 08/03/2009 12:24:55 PM PDT by Ruy Dias de Bivar (Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with)
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To: iowamark

Of course our health care system is fine; what’s wrong is that we expect our health insurance to cover a bloody nose. If we expected our auto insurance to cover flat tires it too would be in finacial trouble. We cannot maintain a service economy and continue to maintain our current lifestyle. “We cannot go on taking in each others’ wash.” Chesterton
Our health insurance system is socialism plain and simple. It’s time we moved away from socialism, not closer to it.


6 posted on 08/03/2009 12:27:12 PM PDT by RichardMoore (Baldwin2008.com)
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To: iowamark

Bump that!


7 posted on 08/03/2009 12:29:37 PM PDT by Our man in washington
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To: iowamark
But, then, if you believe such facts as those presented in this report, you cannot be "bamboozled" by the politicians into surrendering your liberty!

Don't you know that Democrats create "crises" in order to flim-flam the citizenry into believe they need a "government solution"?

In the ordinary world out there, ordinary people think of "crisis prevention, or "crisis control." In the world of Washington's Democrats, they think of "crisis creation." That has been their path to gaining power and government control of the lives of ordinary citizens, and it is why they must be sent home in 2010!

8 posted on 08/03/2009 12:31:40 PM PDT by loveliberty2
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To: Filo

Self ping for later. . .


9 posted on 08/03/2009 1:25:01 PM PDT by Filo (Darwin was right!)
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To: iowamark

bookmark.


10 posted on 08/03/2009 2:38:46 PM PDT by IrishCatholic (No local Communist or Socialist Party Chapter? Join the Democrats, it's the same thing!)
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To: loveliberty2

Don’t suppose the liberal media will be reporting on these facts very soon! Thank God for conservative talk radio and forums like this.


11 posted on 08/03/2009 3:46:04 PM PDT by PrayAndVoteConservesInLibsOut
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