Sweden shows how to save money in health care

The American Thinker ^ | August 07, 2009 | James Lewis

[Scanian]

Two scandalous news stories about Swedish medical care -- both from taking the cheapest way out -- by not doing routine brain scans.

Story 1, today: Doctors miss fist-sized brain tumour.

"A Swedish woman has reported four physicians to a national body that assesses medical negligence after they missed a brain tumour the size of a fist."

The docs told this poor woman that it was just her usual headaches, and gave her pain pills.

Story 2. Doctors missed pencil in Swedish boy's brain

Published: 17 Dec 08 12:38 CE

"Two doctors from Karlskrona in southern Sweden have been reprimanded for failing to spot the five centimetre piece chunk of a pencil lodged in the brain of a 14-year-old boy."

Now doctors do make mistakes. But you can't miss a fist-sized brain tumor or a three-inch pencil in somebody's brain if you do routine brain scans. The US has a lot more CAT scan machines and MRIs than Europe because we use them a lot more. In these cases a plain X-ray would have told the story.

The only explanation of these horror stories is that Swedish docs don't do those things routinely.

There is something to be said for defensive medicine. American doctors would send those patients off for brain scans just to make sure they were not going to be sued.

But the Swedes save a lot more money.

[HiTech RedNeck]

If we don’t kill our own golden goose, sooner or later a scan of the brain or other organs will become almost as easy as an ordinary fluoroscopic X-ray is now. The patient will sit in a box and the doctor will see it right there in real time. The British, Swedish, etc. systems limp along as well as they do because they borrow technology driven by the American economic machine. Does Obama expect, say, the Martians to take up the slack???

[HiTech RedNeck]

I suppose the Swedes could argue “well, we do hustle more people through our system, so more patients get effectively treated even though we miss a larger percentage of Bad Things.”

[Scanian]

The nurse practioner who works with my oncologist spent some time in Sweden training their nurses. She says their usual training is pretty bad: way below US standards. If so, there probably isn’t too much superior treatment for them to brag about.

[clee1]

There is NOTHING “superior” about socialism. Shared mediocrity all the way....

[Incorrigible]

Bump

[MarkL]

This story, while tragic, reminds me of "the golden days" of the NBC TV show, "ER." While Michael Chriton was still involved in the show, he would insist that there be something funny, taken from real-life ER accounts, written into the daily lives of the medical personnel working in the ER. In this one episode, there was this man sitting in the ER waiting room, and he kept going up to the nurse running the triage, asking to see a doctor. She would continually tell him that he would have to wait, and then the scene would switch to something else. The single episode would cover an entire shift, I don't know, 8 or 12 hours in the ER. At the end of the episode, you see the man wandering into the ER hallways, looking for a doctor, after having been in the waiting room all those hours... The nurse sees him wandering around, and says, "Sir, I'm sorry, but there are seriously injured people here, and you'll just have to wait your turn!" He looks dejected, and turns around, and that's when we notice that there's an arrow sticking out of the back of his head. The nurse immediately finds a doctor for the man.

Mark

[The Great RJ]

My wife is alive today because of a CT scan. She was hospitalized for some cardiac irregularity and her doctor ordered a CT scan in the off chance she had an uncommon adrenal tumor. The CT scan showed a large cancerous tumor on her kidney that was successfully removed before it had spread. Had the CT scan been turned down by some bureaucrat because it was too costly or not cost effective or could only have been done at some major medical center after a long wait she would be dead.

[socialismisinsidious]

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[Munz]

what is worse??
A. missing a pencil in a boys head
B. a brain tumor
C electing a socialist to the most powerful position in the world under the guise of a uniter?

[RipSawyer]

In the old Paul Bunyan tales they spoke of a mountain so high it took three days to see the top...but three men looking together could see the top in one day.

To pull a screwup the size of that mountain and elect Obama Been Rotten takes a whole lot of screwups screwing up together. Worse yet they have to be really dumb so that they think they are doing something great and all the while they have to look down their noses at the people who are trying to save their sorry arses from making a fatal error and talk about how silly they are.

No contest, C. is by far the worst of the three.

[WesternCulture]

Generally speaking, there is a great deal of misunderstanding from an American perspective when it comes to Sweden.

Many Americans say Sweden is Socialist.

That's plain b*ll*sh*t.

Yes, our taxes are high, but we are one of the most successful capitalist nations on Earth, if not THE most successful one. Look at Switzerland and Norway, does their average citizen drive around in a nice Volvo, SAAB, BMW, Audi or MB and does he own two houses (one in the city and a summer house as well) and a yacht/power boat?

Money isn't isn't everything, but challenging Sweden in the domain of material standard of living is futile.