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Health Care/Regulations

 
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 02, 2015 2:54 pm    Post subject: Health Care/Regulations Reply with quote

PeakTrader:

Your statement is biased or incomplete.

For example, paying people $20 an hour 30 hours a week to dig holes and fill them up again inflates GDP, but living standards rise very little.

And, when you measure infant mortality rates the same way, control other factors, e.g. homicides, traffic deaths, etc., the U.S. has the highest average life expectancy in the world.

Just because the cost of education is lower doesn’t mean quality rivals U.S. standards.

France also has higher taxes and thousands of years of accumulated wealth.

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For example, here’s what a MD stated:

The WHO healthcare rankings are worse than useless: they are outright lies. The WHO relies upon self-reporting from each nation. Does anyone believe that Cuba or China provide truthful data?

The WHO rankings also overemphasize “coverage” (where the US ranks very low since we have many uninsured people who have to pay at the time of service — gasp!).

The reason we have fewer MDs per capita than Europe is that our mostly self-employed doctors work 60-80 hours per week while government-employed European doctors work 35 hours per week. This is another worthless comparison that the WHO uses to slam the U.S.

The WHO also ranks the US low for neonatal deaths because we have the strictest reporting standards of any country in the world. If a 30-week-gestational-age premie dies after a week in the NICU, we call that a neonatal death. Most of Europe calls that the equivalent of a stillbirth: they pretend the premature baby wasn’t born alive.

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From article:

“The U.S. has the best record for five-year survival rates for six different cancers. In some cases the differences are huge: 81.2% in the U.S. for prostate cancer vs. 41% in Denmark and 47.4% in Italy; 61.7% in the U.S. for colon cancer vs. 39.2% in Denmark; 12% in the U.S. for lung cancer vs. 5.6% in Denmark.

Also interesting is the fact that there is often a significant difference between white and black cancer survival rates in the U.S., e.g. prostate cancer – 82.7% for whites vs. 69.2% for blacks. But even in that case, the five-year survival rate for blacks (69.2%) is still higher than for all European countries except Switzerland.”

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Coverage is a good thing, although health care insurance is not the same as health care.

Why not increase health care instead?

Yes, the supply of U.S. medical schools or students is limited.

Are you saying that MD was wrong when he wrote (the U.S. has the) strictest reporting standards of any country in the world?

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Robert Hurley:

I am saying that there are many countries that have comparable health statistics – to say we are better than
Sweden makes no sense. We have a good system if you have access to it. “The United States’ ranking is dragged down substantially by deficiencies in access to primary care and inequities and inefficiencies in our health care system according to Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: How the Performance of the U.S. Health Care System Compares Internationally, 2014 Update, by Karen Davis, of the Roger C. Lipitz Center for Integrated Health Care at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; Kristof Stremikis, of the Pacific Business Group on Health, and Commonwealth Fund researchers Cathy Schoen and David Squires.”
Variable Rates of Five-Year Cancer Survival and Cancer Mortality in the U.S.
• From 2002 to 2007, the five-year survival rate for three cancers in the U.S. was relatively high among the eight countries reporting though the ranking varied by condition. For breast cancer, the five-year survival rate in the U.S. was 90.5 percent, the high- est among the eight countries reporting and 12 percentage points higher than the lowest performer (the U.K. at 78.5%). The five-year survival rate
for colorectal cancer was also highest in the U.S. at 65.5%, which was nearly 14 percentage points higher than the lowest performer (the U.K. at 51.6%). On cervical cancer, the U.S. (67.0%) ranked fourth out
of eight countries reporting, behind New Zealand (67.7%), the Netherlands (69.0%), and Canada (71.9%).
• The U.S. had middling-to-low rates of mortality
due to cervical cancer (2.1 per 100,000 population), breast cancer (20.7 per 100,000 population), and colorectal cancer (14.4 per 100,000 population). Of the nine countries for which data were available, only the U.S. and France had mortality rates below the median for all three types of cancer.

What we do know for sure is that our costs are by far the highest and for those costs we do not get overall higher outcomes than that of other developed countries

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PeakTrader:

Our costs are high, because of regulations, lawsuits, unnecessary tests, etc.. Nonetheless, our outcomes are high.

For example, you cite cervical cancer. The screening rate for cervical cancer in the U.S. is the highest in the world (86%).

And, “In the U.S., African-American women have the highest rate of cervical cancer, followed by Hispanics, Caucasians, American Indian/Alaska Natives, and Asian American/Pacific Islanders. Mortality rates are highest for African American women.”

It seems, you want a health care system similar to the VA system, or worse.

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Robert Hurley:

Peak Trader – The studies I have seen do not support your statement that our cost are high because of litigation. If that were true, the cost in Texas after the introduction of tort reform would have been followed by a reduction in the cost. I can’t remember another the study I read, but it estimated the cost of litigation was under 2%. There is no doubt that regulations are a cost, but you have to separate regulations that improve out comes from those that do not. I know of no studies that measure those costs

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PeakTrader:

Robert Hurley, U.S. health care is a $2.6 trillion a year industry.

Even the WHO, which ranked U.S. health care below Cuba, stated the U.S. is #1 in the world in both labor (doctors, nurses, specialists, etc.) and capital (hospitals, equipment, drugs, etc.).

Yet, U.S. medical malpractice insurance is high.

And, Washington D.C. may have more lawyers than Texas Smile

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http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/health_glance-2011-en/05/05/01/index.html?itemId=/content/chapter/health_glance-2011-47-en

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https://qap.sdsu.edu/screening/cervicalcancer/facts.html

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http://www.healthaffairs.org/healthpolicybriefs/brief.php?brief_id=82

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California regulations:

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/prices-646717-percent-state.html

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