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    Default Four Interesting Health Care... Uh... Things

    Couldn't think of the right noun... Anyway, watch the first (SHORT) video if nothing else.






    A free pdf copy of the must-read The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care: A Citizen's Guide, by Sally C. Pipes may be downloaded 100% legally here.




    A (SHORT) list of facts from the Hoover Institution:

    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.
    Finally, a truly superb (AND SHORT) article by Thomas Sowell.

    Beware of Bureaucrats' Prescriptions

    As someone who was once rushed to a hospital in the middle of the night, because of taking a medication that millions of people take every day without the slightest problem, I have a special horror of life and death medical decisions being made by bureaucrats in Washington, about patients they have never laid eyes on.

    On another occasion, I was told by a doctor that I would have died if I had not gotten to him in time, after an allergic reaction to eating one of the most healthful foods around. On still another occasion, I was treated with a medication that causes many people big problems and was urged to come back to the hospital immediately if I had a really bad reaction. But I had no reaction at all, went home, felt fine and slept soundly through the night.

    My point is that everybody is different. Millions of children eat peanut butter sandwiches every day but some children can die from eating peanut butter. Some vaccines and medications that save many lives can also kill some people.

    Are decisions made by doctors who have treated the same patient for years to be over-ruled by bureaucrats sitting in front of computer screens in Washington, following guidelines drawn up with the idea of "bringing down the cost of medical care"?

    The idea is even more absurd than the idea that you can add millions of people to a government medical care plan without increasing the costs. It is also more dangerous.

    What is both dangerous and mindless is rushing a massive new medical care scheme through Congress so fast that members of Congress do not even have time to read it before voting on it. Legislation that is far less sweeping in its effects can get months of hearings before Congressional committees, followed by debates in the Senate and the House of Representatives, with all sorts of people voicing their views in the media and in letters to Congress, while ads from people on both sides of the issue appear in newspapers and on television.

    If this new medical scheme is so wonderful, why can't it stand the light of day or a little time to think about it?

    The obvious answer is that the administration doesn't want us to know what it is all about or else we would not go along with it. Far better to say that we can't wait, that things are just too urgent. This tactic worked with whizzing the "stimulus" package through Congress, even though the stimulus package itself has not worked.

    Any serious discussion of government-run medical care would have to look at other countries where there is government-run medical care. As someone who has done some research on this for my book "Applied Economics," I can tell you that the actual consequences of government-controlled medical care is not a pretty picture, however inspiring the rhetoric that accompanies it.

    Thirty thousand Canadians are passing up free medical care at home to go to some other country where they have to pay for it. People don't do that without a reason.

    But Canadians are better off than people in some other countries with government-controlled medical care, because they have the United States right next door, in case their medical problems get too serious to rely on their own system.

    But where are Americans to turn if we become like Canada? Where are we to go when we need better medical treatment than Washington bureaucrats will let us have? Mexico? The Caribbean?

    Many people do not understand that it is not just a question of whether government bureaucrats will agree to pay for particular medical treatments. The same government-control mindset that decides what should and should not be paid for can also decide that the medical technology or pharmaceutical drugs that they control should not be for sale to those who are willing to pay their own money.

    Right now, medications or treatments that have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration are medications or treatments that you are not allowed to buy with your own money, no matter how desperate your medical condition, and no matter how many years these medications or treatments may have been used without dire effects in other countries.

    The crucial word is not "care" but "control."

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    Yea, you're probably right.
    But, for a certainty, back then,
    We loved so many, yet hated so much,
    We hurt others and were hurt ourselves...

    Yet even then, we ran like the wind,
    Whilst our laughter echoed,
    Under cerulean skies...

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    A short personal anecdote:

    When I damaged my right hand a few years ago, I only had to wait four or five days for reconstructive surgery that resulted in me getting almost full use of my finger back. The doctor was adamant that the surgery be scheduled as quickly as possible so he could repair the damage before it healed.

    That may sound severe, but it was an elective surgery that I didn't "need". The damage was to my right pinkie. I completely severed a nerve and a tendon that rendered the finger practically useless. That would have fucked up my grip and have made it awkward to reach for anything with my right hand. But since there wasn't a queue of people waiting for a shortage of doctors for treatments prescribed by politicians, I was able to get this elective operation that restored my hand to roughly 85% capacity. Otherwise I'd be stuck at zero. I was even in and out of the hospital in three hours.

    Heck, when I initially went to the ER I only waited 30 minutes, if that. And physical therapy had no waiting list at all.

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    Quote Originally Posted by discojoe View Post
    A short personal anecdote:

    When I damaged my right hand a few years ago, I only had to wait four or five days for reconstructive surgery that resulted in me getting almost full use of my finger back. The doctor was adamant that the surgery be scheduled as quickly as possible so he could repair the damage before it healed.

    That may sound severe, but it was an elective surgery that I didn't "need". The damage was to my right pinkie. I completely severed a nerve and a tendon that rendered the finger practically useless. That would have fucked up my grip and have made it awkward to reach for anything with my right hand. But since there wasn't a queue of people waiting for a shortage of doctors for treatments prescribed by politicians, I was able to get this elective operation that restored my hand to roughly 85% capacity. Otherwise I'd be stuck at zero. I was even in and out of the hospital in three hours.

    Heck, when I initially went to the ER I only waited 30 minutes, if that. And physical therapy had no waiting list at all.
    To be honest the same happened to my uncle, and he also had to wait just one week, even if we have public healthcare. This said, I think a fully private healthcare with perfect competition will lead to better results than public healthcare, but the transition is a bitch, and anything inbetween is worse then either extreme solution. If there was strict competition, there wouldn't be incentive for the companies to deny claims to ill people, since people would quickly flock to the company that provided a better coverage and a more fair treatment. As it is now, leaving matters of efficiency aside, the US healthcare system looks quite de-humanizing from an european's perspective - obviously we are always dissatisfied about something the government does because it could have been done better, but if asked to choose I'd guess that nobody would really like to change. We do have private clinics if somebody really wants something done quick and for some reason there's a long waiting list.

    By the way, I don't think that in Europe we have "political coverage", so to speak. It's just something that, fortunately, politicians tend to leave rather untouched, or in the hands of the experts. This is probably because, well, everything is supposed to be free, so it's much harder to give priority to something specific.
    Obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit

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    I could go on about this forever, but for lack of time, I just want to comment on this:

    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.”
    People in Germany are dissatisfied because the system is becoming less people-friendly and fewer things are covered. When I told my mother that there is something like pre-existing conditions, for example, she was mortified. You will have a very hard time finding anyone in Germany who will prefer the American system over the German one. Germans now have to pay about $15 every three months to see their primary physician and you should have heard the uproar when that was implemented.
    “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
    ― Anais Nin

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    As for anecdotes

    a) I had two elective surgeries in Germany and there was never a waiting period longer than you would have here.
    b) After I was diagnosed with cancer, I had to make a million phone calls to make sure everything is in order for treatment and to not allow the insurance company to find a loophole. It was a nightmare.
    c) Because of said diagnosis and treatment, I will have a hard time finding an insurance company although I am considered cured.
    d) The last time I went to the ER, I waited 4 hours and the last time I accompanied someone to the ER, we waited for 7 hours.
    e) I know many people with symptoms who won't go to the doctor because they don't want to be diagnosed for fear of not getting insurance when they graduate.
    f) A friend's daughter needs very expensive treatment and the insurance company has a lifetime cap of $3 million, which will be reached long before treatment is completed.
    g) People have to wait for life-saving treatment, not because of a waiting list, but because insurance companies deny claims.

    I could go on. The bottom line is that the care you get in the US is top notch and I have no complaints there, but the insurance companies are evil and everyone needs to have insurance. Also, the medical treatment I have received in Germany over the years was very good and I never had to worry about being stuck with a bill. People don't realize that Germany, for example, has a distinctly different system than Canada and the UK and Obama's plan is not going to implement their healthcare systems.

    And Sarah Palin needs to stop making up stories about death panels. Crazy bitch (sorry, I digress).
    “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
    ― Anais Nin

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    One more thing:

    This article (foxnews!) contradicts a few things claimed above. And this cannot be blamed on the evil mainstream media this time:

    FOXNews.com - U.S. Trails Others in Health Care Satisfaction - Health News | Current Health News | Medical News

    One-third of Americans told pollsters that the U.S. health care system should be completely rebuilt, far more than residents of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, or the U.K. Just 16 percent of Americans said that the U.S. health care system needs only minor changes, the lowest number expressing approval among the countries surveyed.
    “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
    ― Anais Nin

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    Quote Originally Posted by Kim View Post
    One more thing:

    This article (foxnews!) contradicts a few things claimed above. And this cannot be blamed on the evil mainstream media this time:

    FOXNews.com - U.S. Trails Others in Health Care Satisfaction - Health News | Current Health News | Medical News
    I find the fact that you don't consider Fox News "evil mainstream media" sadly hilarious.

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    I am going to guess NT, leaning towards Gamma.

    Quote Originally Posted by Kim View Post
    I could go on. The bottom line is that the care you get in the US is top notch and I have no complaints there, but the insurance companies are evil and everyone needs to have insurance. Also, the medical treatment I have received in Germany over the years was very good and I never had to worry about being stuck with a bill. People don't realize that Germany, for example, has a distinctly different system than Canada and the UK and Obama's plan is not going to implement their healthcare systems.

    And Sarah Palin needs to stop making up stories about death panels. Crazy bitch (sorry, I digress).
    The problem with Obama's idea is that he is looking to cut costs, but by handing it over to the government, it will inherently raise costs. For instance, treatment for alcoholism is covered by medical care plans (required by law), but for some people the necessity to be covered for alcoholism is very low, so why cover it?
    LIE-Ni, i think, but maybe ILI

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    what type is Sowell?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Ryu View Post
    what type is Sowell?
    LIE, almost certainly.


    Kim: I understand what you're saying, and it's complicated, but basically most/all problems with health care right now are caused by government. The reason insurance companies can get away with doing that is because government meddling raises prices and makes it hard for competitors to exist. No competition is a monopoly, same as government care, but not as powerful.

    About you getting surgery quickly, it was probably because your particular ailment was at the top of a politically directed priority list.
    Last edited by discojoe; 08-11-2009 at 04:00 AM.

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    Another little Sowell snippet that I think Kim should read:

    Politicians are already one of the main reasons why medical insurance is so expensive. Insurance is designed to cover risks but politicians are in the business of distributing largesse. Nothing is easier for politicians than to mandate things that insurance companies must cover, without the slightest regard for how such additional coverage will raise the cost of insurance.

    If insurance covered only those things that most people are most concerned about-- the high cost of a major medical expense-- the price would be much lower than it is today, with politicians piling on mandate after mandate.

    Since insurance covers risks, there is no reason for it to cover annual checkups, because it is known in advance that annual checkups occur once a year. Automobile insurance does not cover oil changes, much less the purchase of gasoline, since these are regular recurrences, not risks.

    But politicians in the business of distributing largesse-- especially with somebody else's money-- cannot resist the temptation to pass laws adding things to insurance coverage. Many of those who are pushing for more government involvement in medical care are already talking about extending insurance coverage to "mental health"-- which is to say, giving shrinks and hypochondriacs a blank check drawn on the federal treasury.

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    Quote Originally Posted by discojoe View Post
    Another little Sowell snippet that I think Kim should read:
    I don't think that quite explains why US healthcare spending is more than double that of countries which have longer average life expentancies.


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    Quote Originally Posted by discojoe View Post
    LIE, almost certainly.
    Just reading his bio on answers.com made gamma NT seem clear enough. He struck me as ILI from the bio, but perhaps LIE.






    He sounds idealistic and intellectual. His idealism comes by excluding Fe and Si, and believing Te, Ni, and Se have all the answers. I don't really see his policies as having any more real impact than one of those super liberal 'everybody make nice and love each other' people; his idealism is 'everybody pull yourselves up by your bootstraps' (generalization). He seems to be a good figure, or prophet, that people of a similar conservative in mindset can refer to, and derive hope or ideological support from. I get the feeling that he tries to address things empirically that perhaps are unable to be addressed empirically.

    I agree with some of his stuff, but, his approach seems somewhat fanciful. It is the same feeling I get when I come across anybody who is so vested in their own quadra values, so to say, and enjoys very much, even takes pride in, neglecting or ignoring other aspects of reality that are 'unvalued' or 'looked down upon'.

    He makes a strong case for having an SF type for a dual. I still have a slight leaning to DJ's activity partner, rather than dual. I'd have to see more of him.


    PS:
    His response to the welfare question by saying something about the woman talking about the issue 'in the middle' - it seems very Ni. His response seemed unconcerned with that "S" reality factor. The opening moral hazard argument by him against 'welfare' or subsidizing schools makes sense, sure, but he doesn't really provide an answer. I agree that rewarding people for failure is not a good thing, but I'm curious as to what he really suggests, I'm not seeing a solution provided. I think the woman's response about expectations was not very good.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Ryu View Post
    Just reading his bio on answers.com made gamma NT seem clear enough. He struck me as ILI from the bio, but perhaps LIE.

    He sounds idealistic and intellectual. His idealism comes by excluding Fe and Si, and believing Te, Ni, and Se have all the answers. I don't really see his policies as having any more real impact than one of those super liberal 'everybody make nice and love each other' people; his idealism is 'everybody pull yourselves up by your bootstraps' (generalization). He seems to be a good figure, or prophet, that people of a similar conservative in mindset can refer to, and derive hope or ideological support from. I get the feeling that he tries to address things empirically that perhaps are unable to be addressed empirically.

    I agree with some of his stuff, but, his approach seems somewhat fanciful. It is the same feeling I get when I come across anybody who is so vested in their own quadra values, so to say, and enjoys very much, even takes pride in, neglecting or ignoring other aspects of reality that are 'unvalued' or 'looked down upon'.
    That's what I also think about him.
    Obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit

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