Does America have the world's best health care?

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Does America have the world's best health care?

It is hard to have an opinion about healthcare without genuine experience of the alternatives.
I have lived for long periods of time in the US, Australia and New Zealand and have experienced all three systems. As a hard wired free markets person this is hard to say but the "socialist" systems in Aus. and NZ are far superior without even taking cost into consideration.

Could it be that the Aussie and Kiwi healthcare is better not because it is more socialized, but because there is more regulatory and health provider capture in the American system by some very profitable firms pushing their very lucrative solutions?

In short, I suspect that this entire healthcare controversy in America is a red herring. I have read reports similar to yours that healthcare in Europe also allows for a variety of more affective, often less expensive solutions, including numerous more natural food and herbs and other non-patentable substances.

In America, it seems that everything requires an expensive patent medicine (for the rest of ones life!), and if that fails, more such meds for the side affects, and if those all fail, fancy surgery interventions. If I'm being robbed, I really don't care if it is via my insurance company or via my government or via termites in my filing cabinet eating my (FRAUDULENT?) Treasury Bills. I was still robbed!

[rjwjr]

Re: Does America have the world's best health care?

Yes, nothing is free, but we can all pay for national healthcare through higher taxes. That is the fair way to do it, and that is the civilized and humane way to do it.

Your opinion here is very well intentioned, however, having productive members of a society pay for the health care of non-productive members doesn't seem like "the fair way to do it" to me. It's not fair to the productive members of society.

As a non-believer in socialized health care, I would need to be convinced that...
A] We taxpayers are paying for the non-insured anyway when they have emergency treatments, pregnancies, etc and that a socialized system would actually cause this tax burden to decrease,
B] That taking away the profit motive for American pharmacuetical and health care firms would not have a negative affect on the quality of drugs, procedures, and innovations that currently come pouring out of the US system in incredible volume compared to all other socialized systems combined.

Since I, and many of the non-believers in this argument are Republicans, or Liberterians, or at least more conservative than liberal in our views, it does little good to try to appeal to our non-existant heart-strings with comments like "the fair way" and "humane". Those warm & fuzzy feelings may be enough to justify your perspective, but others' of us see this as a financial and quality-of-care decision, not an abstract opinion of fairness.

Also some thoughts...
If the US system is really so bad, why is there not a mass exodus of US citizens to Canada or other Countries with national health care? Instead, our number of uninsured apparently continues to just grow and grow with none of those uninsured caring enough about insurance to apparently do anything about it. Those of you that have experience in the US and with other systems, why even consider coming back to the US if oue health care system is so bad?

I'd also be curious on the migration patterns of doctors. Once a non-US citizen receives a medical license somewhere abroad are they doing everything they can to migrate to the ability-to-overcharge, poor-care-acceptable utopia that so many of you claim the US system to be? I don't get the impression that our system is seen as an easy-street goldmine by doctors from abroad.

I can only assume from the evidence that the US system is not as bad as it is sometimes made out to be.

[thedanimal]

Re: Does America have the world's best health care?

Your opinion here is very well intentioned, however, having productive members of a society pay for the health care of non-productive members doesn't seem like "the fair way to do it" to me. It's not fair to the productive members of society.

If the discussion was about police coverage would you feel the same way? After all, why should my taxes pay for someone who doesn't pay taxes to be protected by the police?

[nero3]

Re: Does America have the world's best health care?

Your opinion here is very well intentioned, however, having productive members of a society pay for the health care of non-productive members doesn't seem like "the fair way to do it" to me. It's not fair to the productive members of society.
.

I think the productive members have to pay for the unproductive if the society should be a place to live that is comfortable for the productive members, or else you will virtually have ghosts standing on every street corner, ready to take a fight with the productive members. Criminality would skyrocket and the unproductive members will be behaving in a way that is very destructive to the productive members, making society worse for the productive members. This is what the typical antisocial and conservative republican don't get, they seems to have problems with cause and effect. And I think the US need to move much further in what made the US in the 1950-s, unless the society in the US should keep going in the wrong direction, with more and more violence, kills and so on. Disabling the welfare state is nothing else than a return to the wild west. Taxes will probably be lower, from what seems like almost an all time low level in modern times, but society will just keep getting worse, unless taxes are increased and the welfare state strengthened.

[cjppjc]

Re: Does America have the world's best health care?

I think the productive members have to pay for the unproductive if the society should be a place to live that is comfortable for the productive members, or else you will virtually have ghosts standing on every street corner, ready to take a fight with the productive members. Criminality would skyrocket and the unproductive members will be behaving in a way that is very destructive to the productive members, making society worse for the productive members. This is what the typical antisocial and conservative republican don't get, they seems to have problems with cause and effect. And I think the US need to move much further in what made the US in the 1950-s, unless the society in the US should keep going in the wrong direction, with more and more violence, kills and so on. Disabling the welfare state is nothing else than a return to the wild west. Taxes will probably be lower, from what seems like almost an all time low level in modern times, but society will just keep getting worse, unless taxes are increased and the welfare state strengthened.

You've said some butes before, This one takes the chocolate bar.:cool:

[flintlock]

Re: Does America have the world's best health care?

I think the productive members have to pay for the unproductive if the society should be a place to live that is comfortable for the productive members, or else you will virtually have ghosts standing on every street corner, ready to take a fight with the productive members. Criminality would skyrocket and the unproductive members will be behaving in a way that is very destructive to the productive members, making society worse for the productive members.

I agree with this. While I consider myself a conservative and a productive citizen, I realize we can't have poor zombies roaming the streets. But the best way to help is to provide good jobs and education so they don't need to use the hand of government to take what they need by force. They can EARN it. As it is now, I do favor some sort of socialization of US health care, if only because we've done a beautiful job of destroying jobs for working class people, all while encouraging them to become dependent on the government for handouts.

The key to getting out of the entitlement quicksand we are in is to realize we must provide decent jobs and opportunity for all citizens. Even if that comes at the cost of the most optimum capitalist laissez-faire wet dream. Allowing corporations to freely import labor any time labor costs get higher than what THEY deem reasonable is guaranteeing a permanent underclass in the US. Because they will always claim costs are too high as long as a single human on Earth exists who will work for less.

[touchring]

Re: Does America have the world's best health care?

Touchring please look at the following websites, and adjust your Blood Pressure norms for age. I do not believe that most doctors do this, and the suggested normals are for 20 year olds.

http://www.sturnidae.com/BPChart.php
http://www.disabled-world.com/artman...urechart.shtml







I ran a regression on the age data, and if older than 62, you may use the following equations

Systolic (age adjusted)

Average = 134 + (Age - 62)*0.3479
Max = 147 + (Age - 62)*0.3624
Min = 121 + (Age - 62)*0.3212

Diastolic (age adjusted)

Average = 87 + (Age - 62)*0.2109
Max = 91 + (Age - 62)*0.2109
Min = 83 + (Age - 62)*0.2109

If ave/max/min are taken from a sample population from a developed country, then average may well be in the unhealthy level for age 62s, if we assume that at least half of the population at 62 are having higher than normal bp and many are already on medication, hence have got bp suppressed by medication.

I would therefore take somewhere between min and average as the acceptable bp. In fact, it might well be that the min is upper limit for a healthy bp.

btw:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/in...6141206AAK8md4

Is 150/100 Blood Pressure normal for 47 years old-I don't think so?
We are in UK and 47 years old Men had a chest pain and buzzing noise in his left ear and the blood pressure was 150/100 and that was going on for more than a year and he's been told by the GP that this is normal for his age. Then we had to take him to Doctors in East Europe(where they are taking very good and very fast care of you in clean hospitals not like in UK) and they said that the blood pressure is high and they gave him to take one 10mg Renapril a day. Blood pressure went down from150/100 to 138/89 for 3 months and the noise disappear, but now the tablets are not working any more and the Blood pressure is up to 149/98 again. and the anoing noise is back again. Now the GP in UK says he has to take Renapril 10mg one tablet a day+Amlodipine 5mg one tablet a day. Did anyone had the same problem?

[bpr]

Re: Does America have the world's best health care?

Wow, what a thread.

Is anyone here under a hundred years old?

Jim's story is a gem, and I have a similar one, with a very happy ending that illuminates the weirdness of our healthcare.

I called every pharmacy within fifty miles to find out how much it would cost me to fix this toenail fungus. Turns out, our local nonprofit hospital apothecary offers generic Lamisil (Terbinafine) for $20 for 30 250 mg pills. My podiatrist nearly hit the floor when he heard that. It's cheaper than my Rx copay was back when I was insured.

I'm no expert, so I'll offer up the guy I listen to on this issue, Stephen Bezruchka:
mp3
pdf

Courtesy Rajiv, who might just be an expert on everything, and a thousand years old and nimble.

Seems to me we should have some sort of national system, even if it isn't perfect. Being the only developed country without a healthcare system is absurd.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I don't think anyone ever argued persuasively that the US has the best healthcare system. We don't actually have a system, we have a market, and a skewed one at that.

[BiscayneSunrise]

Re: Does America have the world's best health care?

For a good comparison, perhaps, one may want to google "medical tourism"

An awful lot of Americans are traveling around the world for first rate care at 10-30 cents on the dollar.

[Rajiv]

Re: Does America have the world's best health care?

It turns out that low BP is correlated with higher mortality in elderly people, while high BP is not. See "Is low blood pressure in elderly people just a consequence of heart disease and frailty?"

Low blood pressure has been associated with increased mortality in older people, but it is unclear whether the hypotention is a risk in its own right or just a marker of disease. In this study we investigated the extent to which those in the lowest decile of systolic and diastolic pressures could be predicted by measures of cardiobvascular disease and frailty. We studied 782 people 70 years and over drawn from the only group of general practices in a rural township. Hypotension was defined separately for systolic and diastolic blood pressures as a pressure less than the tenth percentile for the sample as a whole. This was a systolic presure [less than or equal to] 122 mmHg and a diastolic pressure of [less than or equal to] 68 mmHg. There was a significant relationship between low systolic blood pressure and male sex, history of myocardial infarction by questionnaire and low body mass index (BMI), and between low diastolic pressure and male sex, history of angina and myocardial infarction, use of one or more hypotensive drugs, low BMI, low corrected arm muscle area, low self-maintenance score and the use of two or more home services. There was no association with ECG abnormalities. In the multivariate analsys only 4.2% of those with low diastolic pressure and none of those with low systolic pressure could be correctly classified. Hypotension in old age is only partially explained by established cardiovascular disease and frailty.

Introduction

Hypotension is a predictor of increased mortality in elderly people. This paradoxical finding in old age of worsening survival the lower the blood pressure was first described by Mattila et al. in a 5-year prospective study of people aged 85 years and over in Tampere, Finland [1] and has been supported by the findings of Langer et al., who demonstrated a graded survival disadvantage with decreasing diastolic pressure in men aged 75 years and over [2]. It is consistent with the reversal in old age of the significance of other 'risk factors'; increased mortality has been shown with low as opposed to high blood sugar [3], and with low body mass index [4, 5].

[Slimprofits]

Re: Does America have the world's best health care?

There is a fairly careful, and rather critical, analysis of this certificate at (amongst other places) http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/07/atlas-exclusive.html.

I don't see anything at that link about the birth announcements printed in the Honolulu Advertiser and the Star Bulletin.

http://whatreallyhappened.com/IMAGES...rtiser0000.gif

http://whatreallyhappened.com/IMAGES...arBulletin.jpg

It's movie-plot politics. Got popcorn?

One of the ploys of those who would destroy American Freedom is to get us divided against each other.

I agree completely.

[Master Shake]

Re: Does America have the world's best health care?

American health care is twice as expensive as any other developed country and delivers terrible results on average. If you are rich, however, then it's the place to be.

I'm not rich; my wife and I both work and make about $120K combined with two kids. No inheritance money from either parents. I have no issues with the quality of my health care.

I want to prevent any expansion of government involvement in healthcare until someone can provide evidence of where a massive government program has reduced costs, increased efficiency, and provided better service. [crickets chirping]

This latest power grab is all about expanding the reach of government and unions. There needs to be reform, but not the massive overhaul that the Dems want. And there is certainly no rush to do it.

[c1ue]

Re: Does America have the world's best health care?

http://wcco.com/local/iraqi.presiden....2.749763.html

What is interesting is not that foreigners travel to the US for health care.

What is interesting is that they seem to go to places like Minnesota and its Mayo Clinic rather than New York or LA (probably different for cosmetic surgery though).

For those who don't know, the Mayo Clinic has far lower cost structures than almost anywhere else along with a high level of care.

Similarly in senior care - Wisconsin has a very interesting program combining existing federal programs with lifestyle support (as opposed to existing specific medical condition support).