Posted by Kenneth Anderson:
Hoover Senior Fellow Scott Atlas on Why American Health Care
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_07_26-2009_08_01.shtml#1249160012
is not as bad as you might have thought and, as it happens, [1]has
important advantages. (I ran across this in the latest Hoover Digest,
and then found it had been making the rounds.) Dr. Atlas is also head
of the neuroradiology department at Stanford Medical School. (Full
disclosure: I'm also [2]affiliated with Hoover). Dr. Atlas walks
through a list of ten:
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.
References
1. http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/49525427.html
2. http://www.hoover.org/bios/Kenneth_Anderson.html
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