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mat-ty



Joined: 07 Jul 2007
Posts: 7850

PostPosted: Thu Oct 21, 2010 9:27 am    Post subject: 8% Reply with quote

The last set of statistics are the most chilling.....

Just in case you have not seen these very interesting statistics:

A recent "Investor's Business Daily" article provided very
interesting statistics from a survey by the United Nations
International Health Organization.

Percentage of men and women who survived a cancer five years after
diagnosis:

U.S. 65%

England 46%

Canada 42%

Percentage of patients diagnosed with diabetes who received treatment
within six months:

U.S. 93%

England 15%

Canada 43%

Percentage of seniors needing hip replacement who received it within
six
months:

U.S. 90%

England 15%

Canada 43%

Percentage referred to a medical specialist who sees one within one
month:

U.S. 77%

England 40%

Canada 43%

Number of MRI scanners (a prime diagnostic tool) per million people:

U.S. 71

England 14

Canada 18

Percentage of seniors (65+), with low income, who say they are in"
excellent health":

U.S. 12%

England 2%

Canada 6%

I don't know about you, but I don't want "Universal Healthcare"
comparable to England or Canada.

Moreover, it was Sen. Harry Reid who said, "Elderly Americans must
learn to accept the inconveniences of old age."

SHIP HIM TO CANADA OR ENGLAND!

He is "elderly" himself but be sure to remember his health insurance
is different from yours as Congress has their own high - end
coverage! He will never have to learn to accept "inconveniences"!!!

AND THE WINNER IS VERY INTERESTING!

The percentage of each past president's cabinet who had worked in the
private business sector prior to their appointment to the cabinet.
You know what the private business sector is... a real life business,
not a government
job.

Here are the percentages.

T. Roosevelt........ 38%

Taft.....................40%

Wilson ................52%

Harding..................49%

Coolidge.............. 48%

Hoover................. 42%

F. Roosevelt......... 50%

Truman..................50%

Eisenhower...........57%

Kennedy.............. 30%

Johnson................47%

Nixon................... 53%

Ford.................... 42%

Carter.................. 32%

Reagan................56%

GH Bush............. 51%

Clinton................. 39%

GW Bush.............55%

And the winner is:

Obama................ 8%!!!

Yep! That's right! Only Eight Percent!!!..The least by far of the
last 19 presidents!! And these people are trying to tell our big
corporations
how to run their business? They know what's best for
GM...Chrysler... Wall Street... and you and me?

How can the president of a major nation and society...the one with
the most successful economic system in world history... stand and
talk about business when he's never worked for one?.. Or about jobs
when he has never
really had one??! And neither have 92% of his senior staff and
closest advisers! They've spent most of their time in academia,
government and/or non-profit jobs....or as "community organizers"

May want to pass this on, we will NEVER see it in the main street
media, I gar-0n-tee!!!
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coboardhead



Joined: 26 Oct 2009
Posts: 4303

PostPosted: Thu Oct 21, 2010 10:01 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Re: Health care statistics

Careful of those numbers on access to specialists etc. There is a lot of variation in what is considered a specialist, what is considered a cure and which survey is compared to which. I have read a dozen comparisons and they are all over the map.

Remember, we spend almost 17% of GDP and most of the other nations spend far less (around 12% of GDP).

I think our health care system is the best in the world, if you are seriously sick or injured. It is not the best at keeping us healthy. This is complex, since our country's lifestyles are not as healthy as many Euro nations and Canada.

And, a lot of us spend more than we NEED on health care, and houses, and energy and ......

Mat-ty - If you are really interested in the costs and challenges in health care for seniors, I would suggest you read "The Brave New World of Health Care" by Richard Lamm (ex gov. of Colorado).


Last edited by coboardhead on Thu Oct 21, 2010 10:10 am; edited 1 time in total
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MalibuGuru



Joined: 11 Nov 1993
Posts: 9287

PostPosted: Thu Oct 21, 2010 10:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Why would you need capitalists, when you are no longer a capitalist nation?
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coboardhead



Joined: 26 Oct 2009
Posts: 4303

PostPosted: Thu Oct 21, 2010 10:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Mat-ty

I would be interested if your source compared the US health care system to the Dutch system.

Their system is a lot like our new HC plan, that allows a mix of public and private funding, insurance regulation and reform. Rationing is minimized (impossible to eliminate BTW - exists now). However, costs are lower. There is still a lot of choice available to the consumers.
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mat-ty



Joined: 07 Jul 2007
Posts: 7850

PostPosted: Thu Oct 21, 2010 11:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I just watched a special on PBS about healthcare. They went to Canada. England, Germany, and Taiwan. Very interesting, they kept implying that there system was better than ours. Which may be true, but they never mentioned TAXES!!!! last time I checked , nothing is free.
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Thu Oct 21, 2010 11:20 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Medicare already costs 9 times its projections. Why will universal health care projections be any better?

From the National Center for Policy Analysis:
Medical care in the United States is derided as miserable compared to health care systems in the rest of the developed world. Economists, government officials, insurers and academics alike are beating the drum for a far larger government rôle in health care. Much of the public assumes their arguments are sound because the calls for change are so ubiquitous and the topic so complex. However, before turning to government as the solution, some unheralded facts about America's health care system should be considered.

Fact No. 1: Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers.[1] 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 U.K. and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.

Fact No. 2: Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians.[2] Breast cancer mortality is 9 percent higher, prostate cancer is 184 percent higher and colon cancer mortality among men is about 10 percent higher than in the United States.

Fact No. 3: Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries.[3] Some 56 percent of Americans who could benefit are taking statins, which reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease. 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.

Fact No. 4: Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians.[4] Take the proportion of the appropriate-age population groups who have received recommended tests for breast, cervical, prostate and colon cancer:
* Nine of 10 middle-aged American women (89 percent) have had a mammogram, compared to less than three-fourths of Canadians (72 percent).
* Nearly all American women (96 percent) have had a pap smear, compared to less than 90 percent of Canadians.
* More than half of American men (54 percent) have had a PSA test, compared to less than 1 in 6 Canadians (16 percent).
* Nearly one-third of Americans (30 percent) have had a colonoscopy, compared with less than 1 in 20 Canadians (5 percent).

Fact No. 5: Lower income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians. Twice as many American seniors with below-median incomes self-report "excellent" health compared to Canadian seniors (11.7 percent versus 5.8 percent). Conversely, white Canadian young adults with below-median incomes are 20 percent more likely than lower income Americans to describe their health as "fair or poor."[5]

Fact No. 6: Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the U.K. Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long - sometimes more than a year - to see a specialist, to have elective surgery like hip replacements or to get radiation treatment for cancer.[6] All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada.[7] In England, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.[8]

[I phone specialists directly and get in within a few days if my problem is not urgent. I consulted about 8 specialists in several weeks regarding my prostate cancer.]

Fact No. 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."[9]

Fact No. 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 to only 41.5 percent of Canadians; a lower proportion of Americans are dissatisfied (6.8 percent) than Canadians (8.5 percent).[10]

Fact No. 9: Americans have much better access to important new technologies like medical imaging than patients in Canada or the U.K. Maligned as a waste by economists and policymakers naïve to actual medical practice, an overwhelming majority of leading American physicians identified computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the most important medical innovations for improving patient care during the previous decade.[11] [See the table.] The United States has 34 CT scanners per million Americans, compared to 12 in Canada and eight in Britain. The United States has nearly 27 MRI machines per million compared to about 6 per million in Canada and Britain.[12]

Fact No. 10: Americans are responsible for the vast majority of all health care innovations.[13] The top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other single developed country.[14] Since the mid-1970s, the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology has gone to American residents more often than recipients from all other countries combined.[15] In only five of the past 34 years did a scientist living in America not win or share in the prize. Most important recent medical innovations were developed in the United States.[16] [See the table.]
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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Thu Oct 21, 2010 12:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Assuming that American healthcare is in fact superior, seems to me that extending that care more universally to more Americans through mandated health insurance coverage would improve our stats even more, and additionally, ultimately help drive down the rising costs.

Regarding the National Center for Policy Analysis, one had to wonder when they were gathering their information whether they took into consideration those folks whose only source of healthcare is received from hospital emergency rooms. I would tend to doubt it.
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coboardhead



Joined: 26 Oct 2009
Posts: 4303

PostPosted: Thu Oct 21, 2010 1:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Excellent points Isobars.

I have seen a lot of this information also. In addition, my personal experiences and observations tell me the same thing.

We have the best health care INFRASTRUCTURE in the world. IMO without question. But, we better; it costs a lot more!

The biggest problem with the current health care system, is not the services that are provided, it is the disorganized and highly variable ways it is paid for. Medicare, for example, often, reimburses providers at rates less than 25% of other insurers. Medicare is being supported by those with better insurance. This is unsustainable.

And, lots of folks receive expensive care in ER's, with no intention of paying for it. I, for one, am not prepared to send sick people back into the streets because they cannot afford basic health care.

I think it is also important to point out that if you are lucky enough to be employed or retired from a large company, government job or the military you are in a different marketplace than those in small businesses or the working class. Those group policies provide a much higher level of security than available for the rest of us.

This is how I have reconciled the requirement for purchasing insurance within the plan. Really, it is the plan! This is why insurance reform is necessary.
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Thu Oct 21, 2010 2:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

coboardhead wrote:
1. I, for one, am not prepared to send sick people back into the streets because they cannot afford basic health care.

2. insurance reform is necessary.


1. What is "basic health care"?
WHY can they not afford it? If they dropped out of school, got wasted, bought a new pickup instead of insurance, watched American Idol rather than working a second job, had kids they could not afford, eat in restaurants, own big TVs, buy movie popcorn, wear $50 sneakers or $30 jeans, do not max out their matched-fund 401ks, have an aftermarket sound system in their car, smoke, live in a home worth more than their annual income, go to rock concerts or pro ball games, own a smart phone, have satellite TV, buy new furniture, etc., they chose not to have money for insurance. That gives them zero right to have the government take my money at gunpoint for their benefit. I'm neither their damned nanny nor their money pot. Anyone who feels otherwise is welcome to support them but has zero right to force me to reward their bad decisions.

2. I'll bet that not one person in North America disagrees with that.
I'll bet virtually NO non-socialist and INFORMED person in North America believes the best solution is S-P, G-R, UHC, aka socialized medicine, as Barack Obama explicitly stated is his goal.


Last edited by isobars on Thu Oct 21, 2010 2:31 pm; edited 1 time in total
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coboardhead



Joined: 26 Oct 2009
Posts: 4303

PostPosted: Thu Oct 21, 2010 2:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

As unfair as this is, those people, currently get health care, at least in Colorado, due to a law that requires any ER getting ANY state funds to treat ANYONE coming through the door. That is EVERY rural hospital.

Mandated insurance is addressing this. Yeah, this sucks for the government to have to babysit. At least these folks will have to pay SOMETHING under the new plan.

These folks don't opt out of medical treatment. They just opt out of paying for it.
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