The Newest Last-Place Finish for U.S. Health Care

Source: The Century Fdn

The new study, funded by Commonwealth and appearing in the Jan/Feb ’08 issue of Health Affairs, looks at “deaths from certain causes before age 75 that are potentially preventable with timely and effective health care.” Relevant causes of death include diabetes mellitus, intestinal infectious diseases, whooping cough, childhood respiratory diseases, leukemia and others.

The authors, both from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, found that America’s success in staving off these health problems has decreased over time. Between 1997/1998 and 2002/2003, preventable deaths fell by an average of 16 percent in all 19 industrialized countries considered; but the decline in the U.S. was only 4 percent. In 97/98, “the U.S. ranked 15th out of the 19 countries on this measure—ahead of only Finland, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and Ireland—with a rate of 114.7 deaths per 100,000 people.

“By 2002–03, the U.S. fell to last place, with 109.7 per 100,000. In the leading countries, mortality rates per 100,000 people were 64.8 in France, 71.2 in Japan, and 71.3 in Australia.”



Read more: http://www.tcf.org/list.asp?type=NC&pubid=1774

We're ranked first in preventable deaths.

We're number 1! We're number 1! We're number 1! We're number 1!

We suck!

Up the retirement age and kill them off before they can use many benefits.

is enough to shorten anyone's life.

Older people in this country are suffering an epidemic of Diabetes II. It can be caused by interrupted sleep patterns (such as jets, trains, loud noise), HRT, Depleted Uranium, stress, etc.

All this above with our bad diet makes us live shorter lives.

you just discribed me to a "T" ... no wonder I feel like shit - on top of that you should try doing all you've mentioned and live in New Orleans ... damn - now I really feel bad ... thanks a lot!

now you know why what can we\you do about it? Demand better?

fast food when you barely have time to fight traffic, clean the house, pay the bills, take care of your children, go to work and hope like hell you have some kind of time left to spend with your family and friends. They are going to run us all into poverty so they can have us as their puppets looking for any handout, thinking they are great as we physically run the country so they can live the American elites dream. They have come up with a type of slavery that not too many realize exists, these folks are pretty intelligent and we the sheeple well...We are the sheep in a herd, waiting for their media to tell us what is important next and what we should do about it.

This has been taking place for a long time but it seems to have sped up lately. The bilderberg meetings started back in the 50's and things have deteriorated ever since. The bilderberg group invites the elite from politics, business and the media, the media seems to be the best group to invite because most of the sheeple follow its lead. I wonder why they invite our politicians and people like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown but don't invite any of the countries that are oil rich like Iraq, Iran or Venezuela? Could it be that those folks have oil and don't need to go along with their plan to enslave the world and they cant plan to attack them for their resources if they include them in the meetings?

Our diets aren't to blame, its why we have those diets thats to blame.

Privatization does not work here.... it gets abused and people die because of it.

This is the necessary and foreseeable consequence of a laissez faire health care "system," where the level of care is proportional to ability to pay. All those countries who have that horrible "socialized medicine" are better than us at taking care of their people. We are only good at taking care of the people who need help the least.

and I said nothing regarding either candidates that you mentioned. I just didn't understand your reply to my post. Did you think I was a Hillary or Obama supporter?

I want a non-for-profit health care system. Insurance companies are a "middleman-bureaucratic" scam.

... but think of all the insurance jobs you're providing ... and bankruptcies ... and funeral services ... why, you don't want to see health clinics in every neighborhood filled with doctors, that although might not have to make millions to pay for the medical malpractice suits filled by all those lawyers, can't forget all the lawyers this would put out of work, we wouldn't want to see out of work" lawyers now, would we? and have these doctors making modest comfortable livings by keeping people healthy rather than only seeing them when they're sick?

Come on people! THINK! Jobs! Money! It would "hurt the economy", and if hurts the economy, as our very knowledgeable president has said, and if anyone knows how to hurt an economy - it's him - "fuck the people" ... or something to that nature ...

Anyway, this is all stupid ... just don't ever get sick or have an accident. Personally, I try not to leave my couch. Currently I'm considering having 3 walls from my living room, kitchen and bathroom knocked out and putting my couch on a rail I can move from room to room.

in America between insurance companies. We have huge monopolies. The costs are fixed and rise as they want. No one controls the corruption or attempts to stop the greed even though it involves lives and bad care.

Lives for profit seem OK with many people. I'm horrified anyone would even think that type of system is OK.

Were these people raised in the woods with the wolves?

HealthCare finished dead LAST there too.

The For Profit Health Insurance Corporations did well, finished FIRST.

And it isn't far behind a couple more.

I really do think the size of our population has something to do with it. The only country of the other 18 on that list that has over 100 million people is Japan, and their population is about 1/3 of ours. They also live on a much smaller land mass, and import much of what they use, so no wonder they're a(or the) leader in technological innovation. If they weren't, they would collapse.

You look at the top 10 countries in world population, we're at #3, Japan is at #10, and there isn't another country on that graph in the top 10. We're a "developed" country, with the population of a "developing" country. We have 300,000,000 people in the US. Canada, who we always compare ourselves to in terms of healthcare, has 30 million. You look at how complicated our tax structure is already, and how abused it gets by those who know what they're doing, and no wonder it takes so long for us to get to a universal system.

Some of those countries have to make sure everyone possible stays alive for as long as possible, because they have so few people. Speaking economically, we in the US are easy to replace.

Break the US up into smaller individual countries, and you could probably get a very good healthcare system in the countries that wanted it. Instead, what we have are a handful of insurance companies, which act as smaller countries in a way. Not to the nth degree, but in general.

I just think there are more factors than simply, "give us universal care, now!". It's the same with our trasportation. European countries were built a long time ago, when the world was much bigger. America has all kinds of "open" land to build on. So it's easier to do the whole mass transporation in European countries(smaller populations, smaller distances), than it is here. Yes, auto and oil companies do all they can to make sure we stay dependent on their products, but we have a hand in that by buying their products, because we feel that if we don't have mobility, we're missing out on something, or the job requires long distance travel, or this or that reason.

Well, we can't have everything. We can't have 300,000,000 people, on a giant piece of land, and expect to live the same way as a country with 10 million, in a much smaller location. We still live in physical reality. We have to give to get.

a loosely-coupled group of nations, not one gigantic conglomerate. Maybe it's time to return to that?

The fact that our economic base is rapidly being offshored notwithstanding, we're still the wealthiest nation on earth. The vast economic resources of the USA are more than enough to support concepts like mass transit (or a green economy in general) and socialized medicine. It is not a matter of having too large or too dispersed a population. It is simply a matter of summoning the collective will to get it done. Once that happens, the obstacles you cite will be easily overcome.

since those countries have so far fewer people, they have far fewer dollars to spread around to use on healthcare.

But if you actually read the report, we use more dollars per person than any of those countries (sometimes twice as much per person) and they still receive better healthcare.

Why? Well because they do not run their healthcare system on a profit motive basis with insurance/drug company CEO's taking home multi-million dollar bonus checks. And they don't have insurance/drug company stockholders screaming for a huge share of taxpayer dollars.

Socialized medicine is more effective AND less expensive, in the aggregate. Health care in the USA has become just another mechanism for redistributing wealth upward, and into fewer hands.

But hey, WE'RE #1!!!! WOOOOO!!!

When do you think we'll start topping the infant mortality list? 2013?

We're pretty far down the list on both of those now. Somewhere in the 40s on life expectancy, likewise on infant mortality, despite spending more per capita on health care than ANY NATION ON EARTH.

... enough money for the lastest, greatest weapon sytem. It comes to killing people, money is no object.

What a great country we live in ...

We can have decent health care. The point is, we USED to have top notch health care, it's been declining. As long as our health care system is being run by for-profit insurance companies it will CONTINUE to deteriorate. This is how they make their money. So although there are more factors than "give us universal care, now", it is probably one of the two most important factors. The other is that the system must be not-for-profit. No one should make a profit on the ill or injured. Of all the services that our government should provide for us, national health would have to be the most important.

The United States, with its vast resources, should be in a position to implement highly efficient public health care and transportation.

Many of the "facts" you cite are simply wrong. Europe was not "built a long time ago." Europe was substantially rebuilt after WWII. They've had to recover from two world wars, neither of which were fought on our land.

The United States is pathetic in this respect. We should be leading the world, showing everyone how it can be done. Instead we're trailing and I don't buy the excuse that "we're too big."

It's like the 'population density' argument, that 'our people are too spread out' and 'hospitals are too far away'. Except that Cananda and Australia are ranked far above us.

If we can generate the political will to overcome the for-profit demographic that is keeping our deadly system in place, we could have universal health care, easily.

The U.S. can afford a high death rate because it has a large population? Best compare the U.S. to India, then, and forget those other places like Canada.

``If they would rather die,'' said Scrooge, ``they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.

The US Chamber of Commerce has just said as much.

They sneak into this country and die, just to mess our statistics up. :sarcasm:

It's all us Canadians coming down, because we have such a crappy system. We're shipping you all our really sick people so we can keep our scores looking good.

:hi:

I'm sure our elected officials will get right on the case and make sure all Americans are provided free health care if they can't afford it and education in preventative medicine as soon as possible, and that ... huh? ... what? .... what? ... oh... okay, I'm awake now ... never-mind ...

So when the next politician asks: Do you REALLY want government involved in your healthcare - I think we have a simple and straightforward answer.

When will our country be right for the change to single payer health care.

Don't worry about the fiscal soundness, of Social Security and Medicare -- you won't live to see them, anyway!

;-)

take them away. I assured her they would and plan to unless we do something to stop it. She still didn't believe me.

Are Republicans living in denial that their government won't do it?