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  1. Not everybody has to think just like you, my friend. I read what you write, I simply don't agree with it.

    You are also ignoring lifespan, survival rates, infant mortality, outcome measures, unexpected deaths, and other import metrics that are used to assess health care. Most of us don't try to split hairs by trying to separate health care from the health care system that provides it. It is far too complex for that.

    http://www.examiner.com/article/the...ot-have-the-best-health-care-system-the-world

    The truth is that Americans pay more for health care than any other country in the world and yet the health care Americans receive is ranked by the World Health Organization (WHO) 37th in overall performance and 72nd in overall level of health of the 191 nations included in the 2000 study. It's not all bad however, the U.S. is ranked high in catching rare cancers early.

    In 2008, a report by the Commonwealth Fund ranked the U.S. last in the quality of health care among the 19 countries compared. The United States has the highest infant mortality rate of all develped countries. And yet, the Commonwealth Fund reports that the U.S. "leads all industrialized countries in the share of national health care expenditures devoted to insurance administration.

    The United States is the only wealthy, industrialized, developed country in the world that does not offer health care to all of its citizens.
    ​
    We especially cannot try to separate what we pay for health care because those costs are preventing too many people from getting any care at all. I am quite sure that the top 20% of wealthy Americans receive the finest care that money can buy, but if the lowest 30% cannot afford even basic care, then America ranks low in comparison with other modern countries. You can't just examine your own experience when assessing national issues. The cost of American health care is exorbitant and it is affecting the quality of care that we provide.

    Medical bills prompt more than 60% of all U.S. bankruptcies according to CNN. Bankruptcies attributed to medical bills increased by nearly 50% from 2001 to 2007. 75% of all people who went bankrupt because of medical bills had health insurance.
  2. Many of these meaures are impacted by factors outside of the quality of healthcare, and ren't good metrics. Infant mortality is no measured uniformally by industrialized nations. In America still born babies are figured into te infant mortality rate. In some European nations that is not the case. Germany specifically. They only count babies born alive that die within a certain time period. Our iinclusion of still born babisskews our number up.

    Lifespan is another measure that not indicitive of the quality of healthcare. Americans lead very dangerous lifestyles. We drive cars everywhere, which is insanely dangerous. We eat shitty foods. And our demographics also lay a part in this. Black people haveshorter lifespans everywhere, and we hae more black people than other western nations.
    LSUpride123 likes this.
  3. I find that distinction to be the most important. How do we know what to fix if we don't know what the problem is. Is it the care, or the delivery of the care? Also, i don't accept infant mortality, lifespan, etc. as measures of healthcare. How can you? There are way to many external factors.
  4. So, do you accept any metric at all other than how long you have to sit in a doctors office?
    MLUTiger likes this.
  5. Perhaps, but overall health care is still a huge factor. How can you simply ignore it?
  6. This was coming from a cancer Dr I know very well here in Houston,Tx. But like I said, to go from once a year to three in a lifetime? Like he told me many times you may need a yearly or every other year. Three times that's it. He went into detail on more changes, not good.
  7. I would disagree. I think various aspects of lifestyle may be the largest factors in life expectancy when we're discusisng differences in life expectancy among Western European nations and the US. Obviously healthcare is a huge factor in prolonging life but the disparity in healthcare between all these countries isn't as great a factor as the disparity in lifestyles.

    I feel like that may not make sense so let me try it a different way. the most important thing to life expectancy is, no doubt, medical advances. Antibiotics, surgeries, etc. However, techniques are known and practice worldwide. There are very few procedures that are done only in one country and not in another (speaking about western european and the US). So I don't think it's as big a factor in the difference in life expectancy as our lifestyle differences are. We can't know because it's impossible to measure and as Supa pointed out, many of the metrics are not uniform amongst countries anyway.
  8. So . . . neither of you will accept any metric whatsoever to asses the quality of health care?

    You have asked me for evidence, so now I am asking you . . . what is your evidence that the US has the highest health care in the world?

    And try not to ignore the costs of care. If Americans survive disease X 5% better than Europeans . . . is it smart to pay 250% more for that 5% margin?

    And google unnecessary medical tests some time. Doctors often tend to order every test and prescribe whatever the insurance company is willing to pay for, whether it is truly needed or not. They get a piece of the action, too. More is not always better. And we wonder why our insurance costs rise far higher than our health improvement does.

    I do not argue that we do not get good care here. I argue that equal and better care is offered elsewhere for a lot less money. We would be foolish not to reassess our own system and to emulate what works elsewhere.
  9. Yes. It's just the ones commonly cited as drags on American healthcare aren't particularly good measures of the quality of care. When you look at actual healthcare outcomes, our healthcare results look much better and lead the world in many respects.

    I would also agree that our delivery model is flawed, but ACA will not help that. ACA doubles down on many of the factors that drive up our rates. More medicaid means more below cost reimbursements. That leads to healthcare providers wanting to up the contractual rates with the insurers they are contracted with, which means higher premiums. Also the requirements to insure the sick and the old mean the young and the healthy have to pay more. ACA will also put strains on our already shorthanded PCPs. More people with access means fewer and costlier appointments. Further constraining that is more doctors are simply not taking insurance. The reimbursements arent good enough. My wife's old doctor sent out a letter over the summer stating he was no cash only, and you could pay for a year of service up front. My cousin who is an OBGYN has also taken her practice in this direction because her medicaid re-imbursements were averaging 6 months. At one point she had over 2 million dollars in reimbursements jammed in with backlogged medicaid processing. She was already taking a hit because the Medicaid reimbursements on maternity care are well lower than what private insurer contractuals.
  10. Drop the strawman.

    another factor ACA does not address and that democrats refused to even discuss would help with this... Tort reform. Docs feel like they have to practice defensive medicine or risk getting sued.

    These places where healthcare costs less have higher taxes and price controls which both mask the true cost of healthcare.
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