The United States is at one end of the spectrum in terms of government control of medical care. Some fault medical care in the United States for an average American life expectancy that is exceeded in a number of other countries.
However, medical care is not the same as health care. Many things that shorten human life — including homicide, drug overdoses and obesity — are more a result of individual choices rather than the state of medical care. Things which tend to be worse in the United States than in some other Western countries.
The United States usually ranks higher than countries with government-run medical systems on such things as waiting times to see primary care physicians, waiting times to see specialists or have surgery, and cancer survival rates. 23% of the patients having elective surgery in 2001 in Australia waited more than 4 months for that surgery. So did 38% of the patients in Britain. In the United States, only 5% of patients had to wait that long.
Waiting lists for elective surgery generally tend to be found in countries which combine public health insurance, with zero or low patient cost sharing and constraints on surgical capacity. Public health insurance and zero cost sharing remove the financial barriers to access to surgery.
Constraints on capacity prevent supply from matching demand. Under such circumstances, non-price rationing, in the form of waiting times for elective surgery, takes over from price rationing as a means of equilibrating demand and supply.
Elective surgery, incidentally, was not limited to cosmetic procedures but included coronary artery bypass surgery.
Moreover, although a four-month waiting period was used as a benchmark for collecting statistics, in Britain 3,592 patients waited more than six months for a colonoscopy and 55,376 waited more than six months for an audiology diagnosis, according to a report in the British Medical Journal in 2007.
In Canada, according to a provincial government website, 90% of Ontario patients needing hip replacements waited 336 days. In Britain, the wait is a year.
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5 comments:
Several years ago I had chest pains. One week later I had a heart cath to diagnose the problem. Within 24 HOURS of the heart cath I had bypass surgery potentially staving off a serious heart attack or worse. Obviously this system needs a total overhaul, it failed me miserably!
Nice anecdote, Wenzel. Good thing you had insurance and didn't end up like one of the 45,000 people that die every year due to a lack of health insurance.
Name one Rich! Quit with the MSNBC talking points. How about lives lost with rationed care?
45,000 lives lost, they must have lived in the same tunnel with the 7 million homeless only present during Republican administrations.
What a bunch of HS.
to "cure" the less than 15% uninsured, we need to FU the whole system. No we need to further transfer the wealth and lose personal freedoms.
The study was performed by Harvard Medical School researchers. It's not University of Louisville, but hey, they may know a thing or two about medicine. It was a very credible study and it is intuitive as well.
We don't just need to "cure" 15% uninsured, we have to reduce costs and improve delivery. The current system sucks and is only serving the physicians, pharma & insurance companies. Americans deserve better.
Americans do deserve better and based on their overwhelming failure to run anything well besides the military our government taking control is not the answer. They are going to wreck the American health care system and we will all pay dearly for this overreach.
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