The Observation Deck

Ivor Karabatkovic wrote:You guys are lunatics. I'll just let you all live in your own reality, I feel like I'm talking to a wall.

Bret, you raise a really good point. That is a great question- the moral and legal debate is something that can be applied to pretty much every policy created.

Congress passed the bill without knowing what was in it. Barack Obama signed it without reading it. Now it looks as though the Associated Press reported on ObamaCare without comprehending its content. Readers will have to scroll far down to discover that the elimination of a key tax break that kept retirees on company prescription-medication plans will mean dumping millions of seniors onto Medicare — and that the AP ignored it until now:

Somehow a normal bill-to-law process in the House and Senate, which followed all the rules and regulations of the US Constitution is deemed unconstitutional, while denying a child or adult the right to see a doctor is perfectly fair.

Medicaid is health insurance that helps many people who can't afford medical care pay for some or all of their medical bills.

Good health is important to everyone. If you can't afford to pay for medical care right now, Medicaid can make it possible for you to get the care that you need so that you can get healthy and stay healthy.

Medicaid is available only to people with limited income. You must meet certain requirements in order to be eligible for Medicaid. Medicaid does not pay money to you; instead, it sends payments directly to your health care providers. Depending on your state's rules, you may also be asked to pay a small part of the cost (co payment) for some medical services. (For more information, download "Medicaid At-A-Glance 2005" from the bottom of the page.)

sharon kinsella wrote:Ivor spoke the truth Bill.

Look at our death rates for delivery and labor. Infant mortality.

Those are two I know make us look bad, I'm sure there's more. We are deluded if we think we are the best. Every country does.

Don't you know that the Europeans and Canadians laugh at us? Read something outside your comfort zone, check the media in other countries, talk to the people. You'll be surprised.

sharon kinsella wrote:Ivor spoke the truth Bill.

Look at our death rates for delivery and labor. Infant mortality.

Those are two I know make us look bad, I'm sure there's more. We are deluded if we think we are the best. Every country does.

Don't you know that the Europeans and Canadians laugh at us? Read something outside your comfort zone, check the media in other countries, talk to the people. You'll be surprised.

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]

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]

sharon kinsella wrote:Stephen - This is the American Association of Family Physicians site.

Non- right wing facts -

According to the study's authors, "Among the six nations studied -- Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States -- the U.S. ranks last, as it did in the 2006 and 2004 editions of 'Mirror, Mirror.' Most troubling, the U.S. fails to achieve better health outcomes than the other countries, and as shown in the earlier editions, the U.S. is last on dimensions of access, patient safety, efficiency, and equity."

Read all of this one here -

Click Here Please

Enjoy REAL facts.

[1] Concord Working Group, "Cancer survival in five continents: a worldwide population-based study,.S. abe at responsible for theountries, in s chnologies, " Lancet Oncology, Vol. 9, No. 8, August 2008, pages 730 - 756; Arduino Verdecchia et al., "Recent Cancer Survival in Europe: A 2000-02 Period Analysis of EUROCARE-4 Data," Lancet Oncology, Vol. 8, No. 9, September 2007, pages 784 - 796.

[2] U.S. Cancer Statistics, National Program of Cancer Registries, U.S. Centers for Disease Control; Canadian Cancer Society/National Cancer Institute of Canada; also see June O'Neill and Dave M. O'Neill, "Health Status, Health Care and Inequality: Canada vs. the U.S.," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 13429, September 2007. Available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w13429.

[3] Oliver Schoffski (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg), "Diffusion of Medicines in Europe," European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, 2002. Available at http://www.amchampc.org/showFile.asp?FID=126. See also Michael Tanner, "The Grass is Not Always Greener: A Look at National Health Care Systems around the World," Cato Institute, Policy Analysis No. 613, March 18, 2008. Available at http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9272.

[4] June O'Neill and Dave M. O'Neill, "Health Status, Health Care and Inequality: Canada vs. the U.S."

[5] Ibid.

[6] Nadeem Esmail, Michael A. Walker with Margaret Bank, "Waiting Your Turn, (17th edition) Hospital Waiting Lists In Canada," Fraser Institute, Critical Issues Bulletin 2007, Studies in Health Care Policy, August 2008; Nadeem Esmail and Dominika Wrona "Medical Technology in Canada," Fraser Institute, August 21, 2008 ; Sharon Willcox et al., "Measuring and Reducing Waiting Times: A Cross-National Comparison Of Strategies," Health Affairs, Vol. 26, No. 4, July/August 2007, pages 1,078-87; June O'Neill and Dave M. O'Neill, "Health Status, Health Care and Inequality: Canada vs. the U.S."; M.V. Williams et al., "Radiotherapy Dose Fractionation, Access and Waiting Times in the Countries of the U.K.. in 2005," Royal College of Radiologists, Clinical Oncology, Vol. 19, No. 5, June 2007, pages 273-286.

[7] Nadeem Esmail and Michael A. Walker with Margaret Bank, "Waiting Your Turn 17th Edition: Hospital Waiting Lists In Canada 2007."

[8] "Hospital Waiting Times and List Statistics," Department of Health, England. Available at http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsand ... dition=Web.

[9] Cathy Schoen et al., "Toward Higher-Performance Health Systems: Adults' Health Care Experiences In Seven Countries, 2007," Health Affairs, Web Exclusive, Vol. 26, No. 6, October 31, 2007, pages w717-w734. Available at http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/reprint/26/6/w717.

[10] June O'Neill and Dave M. O'Neill, "Health Status, Health Care and Inequality: Canada vs. the U.S."

[11] Victor R. Fuchs and Harold C. Sox Jr., "Physicians' Views of the Relative Importance of 30 Medical Innovations," Health Affairs, Vol. 20, No. 5, September /October 2001, pages 30-42. Available at http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/re ... 0/5/30.pdf.

[12] OECD Health Data 2008, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Available at http://www.oecd.org/document/30/0,3343, ... 07,00.html.

[13] "The U.S. Health Care System as an Engine of Innovation," Economic Report of the President (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2004), 108th Congress, 2nd Session H. Doc. 108-145, February 2004, Chapter 10, pages 190-193, available at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy05/ ... 4_erp.pdf; Tyler Cowen, New York Times, Oct. 5, 2006; Tom Coburn, Joseph Antos and Grace-Marie Turner, "Competition: A Prescription for Health Care Transformation," Heritage Foundation, Lecture No. 1030, April 2007; Thomas Boehm, "How can we explain the American dominance in biomedical research and development?" Journal of Medical Marketing, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2005, pages 158-66, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, July 2002. Available at http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/publicatio ... 49_ERP.pdf .

[14] Nicholas D. Kristof, "Franklin Delano Obama," New York Times, February 28, 2009. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/opini ... istof.html.

[15] The Nobel Prize Internet Archive. Available at http://almaz.com/nobel/medicine/medicine.html.

[16] "The U.S. Health Care System as an Engine of Innovation," 2004 Economic Report of the President.

sharon kinsella wrote:Back atcha Stephen. Concord Group is part of an insurance agency.
Most of the "facts" they site are done by agencies under the Bush administration.

Find sources outside pharmaceutical companies. Read the reports from WHO.

There's plenty out there that are not politically attached.

Cancer survival in five continents: a worldwide population-based study (CONCORD).
Coleman MP, Quaresma M, Berrino F, Lutz JM, De Angelis R, Capocaccia R, Baili P, Rachet B, Gatta G, Hakulinen T, Micheli A, Sant M, Weir HK, Elwood JM, Tsukuma H, Koifman S, E Silva GA, Francisci S, Santaquilani M, Verdecchia A, Storm HH, Young JL; CONCORD Working Group.

Cancer Research UK Cancer Survival Group, Non-Communicable Disease Epidemiology Unit, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK. michel.coleman@lshtm.ac.uk

BACKGROUND: Cancer survival varies widely between countries. The CONCORD study provides survival estimates for 1.9 million adults (aged 15-99 years) diagnosed with a first, primary, invasive cancer of the breast (women), colon, rectum, or prostate during 1990-94 and followed up to 1999, by use of individual tumour records from 101 population-based cancer registries in 31 countries on five continents. This is, to our knowledge, the first worldwide analysis of cancer survival, with standard quality-control procedures and identical analytic methods for all datasets. METHODS: To compensate for wide international differences in general population (background) mortality by age, sex, country, region, calendar period, and (in the USA) ethnic origin, we estimated relative survival, the ratio of survival noted in the patients with cancer, and the survival that would have been expected had they been subject only to the background mortality rates. 2800 life tables were constructed. Survival estimates were also adjusted for differences in the age structure of populations of patients with cancer. FINDINGS: Global variation in cancer survival was very wide. 5-year relative survival for breast, colorectal, and prostate cancer was generally higher in North America, Australia, Japan, and northern, western, and southern Europe, and lower in Algeria, Brazil, and eastern Europe. CONCORD has provided the first opportunity to estimate cancer survival in 11 states in USA covered by the National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR), and the study covers 42% of the US population, four-fold more than previously available. Cancer survival in black men and women was systematically and substantially lower than in white men and women in all 16 states and six metropolitan areas included. Relative survival for all ethnicities combined was 2-4% lower in states covered by NPCR than in areas covered by the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) Program. Age-standardised relative survival by use of the appropriate race-specific and state-specific life tables was up to 2% lower for breast cancer and up to 5% lower for prostate cancer than with the census-derived national life tables used by the SEER Program. These differences in population coverage and analytical method have both contributed to the survival deficit noted between Europe and the USA, from which only SEER data have been available until now. INTERPRETATION: Until now, direct comparisons of cancer survival between high-income and low-income countries have not generally been available. The information provided here might therefore be a useful stimulus for change. The findings should eventually facilitate joint assessment of international trends in incidence, survival, and mortality as indicators of cancer control.

Damn Bill, it really must be hard adapting to "slavery" when you've got a great view of the lake. I feel so bad for you. It must be hard living in your blocked off reality.