Posted on 01/09/2008 8:07:15 AM PST by j_hig
WASHINGTON (AFP) - France is tops, and the United States dead last, in providing timely and effective healthcare to its citizens, according to a survey Tuesday of preventable deaths in 19 industrialized countries.
The study by the Commonwealth Fund and published in the January/February issue of the journal Health Affairs measured developed countries' effectiveness at providing timely and effective healthcare.
The study, entitled "Measuring the Health of Nations: Updating an Earlier Analysis," was written by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It looked at death rates in subjects younger than 75 that could have been prevented by timely and effective medical care.
The researchers found that while most countries surveyed saw preventable deaths decline by an average of 16 percent, the United States saw only a four percent dip.
The non-profit Commonwealth Fund, which financed the study, expressed alarm at the findings.
"It is startling to see the US falling even farther behind on this crucial indicator of health system performance," said Commonwealth Fund Senior Vice President Cathy Schoen, who noted that "other countries are reducing these preventable deaths more rapidly, yet spending far less."
The 19 countries, in order of best to worst, were: France, Japan, Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Some countries showed dramatic improvement in the periods studied -- 1997 and 1998 and again between 2002 and 2003 -- outpacing the United States, which showed only slight improvement.
White the United States ranked 15th of 19 between 1997-98, by 2002-03 it had fallen to last place.
"It is notable that all countries have improved substantially except the US," said Ellen Nolte, lead author of the study.
Had the United States performed as well as any of the top three industrialized countries, there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths per year, the researchers said.
Shouldn’t france be first in the number of elderly who die because everyone was on vacation?
They say that the United States “provides” so I am assuming that private practice is excluded from this Socialist study.
Ex-MTV host and Canadian Tom Green came to the US to have his cancer diagnosed and treated in the time he would’ve had to wait to even been seen in Canada.
Yes they were really timely and effective to those 11000 old people that broiled during the summer a couple years ago. Real timely.
Air Conditioning is only for young whipper snappers.
This is such bovine excrement. While traveling in France one of my companions fell from a boat to the concrete surface of a lock and was fairly badly injured. The vaunted French healthcare system offered her essentially no care.
Well, something good has to be said of a culture that eats cheese and drinks wine all day. Ask our “french” senator from Massachusetts what he thinks on this?
Consider the source. A leftist Jimmy Carter remnant is their leader.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Fund
My wife was in healthcare in the USAF in the early 1990s. At a Tricare meeting in DC, Ted Kennedy spoke. Here’s the money quote in answer to the question of when we will get universal healthcare... paraphrased... We are going to break the current system. Then we will be able to step in with a universal model solution.
The report is bogus and completely subjective.
Commonwealth Fund BOD:
Board of Directors
November 16, 2007
James R. Tallon, Jr., Chairman
Mr. Tallon, president of the United Hospital Fund of New York, is recognized nationally for his leadership in health care policy.
Cristine Russell, Vice Chairman
Ms. Russell is an award-winning reporter who has covered science, medicine, and health for three decades.
William R. Brody, M.D.
Dr. Brody is president of The Johns Hopkins University, where he oversees nine schools including the School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Benjamin K. Chu, M.D.
Dr. Chu is regional president, Southern California, with Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospital.
Karen Davis
Ms. Davis is president of The Commonwealth Fund. Prior to joining the Fund in 1992, she was professor of economics and chairman of the Department of Health Policy and Management at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Samuel C. Fleming
Mr. Fleming is founder and director of Decision Resources, Inc., a world leader in research publications, advisory services, and consulting.
Jane E. Henney, M.D.
Dr. Henney is senior vice president and provost for health affairs at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Walter E. Massey
Dr. Massey has been president of Morehouse College in Atlanta since 1995 and previously served as director of the National Science Foundation under President George H. W. Bush.
James J. Mongan, M.D.
Dr. Mongan is president and chief executive officer of Partners HealthCare and chair of the Fund’s Commission on a High Performance Health System.
Robert C. Pozen
Mr. Pozen is chairman of MFS Investment Management.
William Y. Yun
Mr. Yun is president of Fiduciary Trust, a wholly owned subsidiary of Franklin Templeton Investments, and has overall responsibility for all investment management and research activities at the Trust.
(a virtual who’s who of socialized medicine, with a “hate america first bent”)
That’s what I would like to know as well. If you figure in the “private” health care results — hm. If this is only based on “public” facilities — yeah there would be an ‘issue’ with expedient care. But then, a lot of us use private hospitals, private doctors, etc.
Personally I have never experienced a delay in treatment when I (or my insurer) am paying.
Someone needs to remind the rest of the world that the gov’t doesn’t provide our healthcare. And realistically if you looked at our ENTIRE system would these results be the same? I mean geez, can’t improve that much when it is already darn good ;)
Must be the fourth or fifth posting of this. Our health care system is suberb once you jump through all the hoops. Getting to see an actual doctor outside of a hospital is another thing entirely. Its kind of like spotting a whooping crane in your backyard.
Did George Soros sponsor this study too? (See LANCET)
A couple parts of the article I thought most interesting
“The researchers found that while most countries surveyed saw preventable deaths decline by an average of 16 percent, the United States saw only a four percent dip.”
“Had the United States performed as well as any of the top three industrialized countries, there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths per year, the researchers said.”
I call BS on this article and an obvious effort to push socialized healthcare.
That's the way it's supposed to be........
I call complete and total BS.
Yes, this “fund” is run by a JIMMY CARTER APPOINTEE.
“It looked at death rates in subjects younger than 75 that could have been prevented by timely and effective medical care why that cut-off?”
Because they wanted the data to support their agenda.
pretty soon that’s all Europe will have left
I’d bet that the willingness of US doctors to deploy heroic measures, especially in the cases of premature births, effectively skews US rankings. After all, heroic measures that fail are ineffective.
The federal government is doing everything in their power to undermine private sector healthcare.
OK now those socialists need to explain to us why 15000 people died form a heat wave in France in the summer of 2003.
Apparently, the measurement was percentage improvement (reduction?) in the number of "preventable deaths" under age 75. (The story doesn't seem to give a very good definition of what that means).
According to the story, the US had the worst rate of improvement (4% vs an average of 16% improvement) among industrial nations in reduction of "preventable" deaths. Without the context of actual numbers of preventable deaths and the improvement for each country (not to mention scaling these numbers to per capita ratios of some type), such statistics are meaningless at best, and indeed can be directly misleading.
As an example, consider the following hypothetical scenario in which we are measuring the "improvement" or reduction of some bad characteristic:
The beginning numbers are as follows:
US: 25 bad incidents
France: 100 bad incidents
Austrailia: 80 bad incidents
Japan: 60 bad incidents
After the "improvements" the numbers are as follows:
US: 24 bad incidents (only a 4% improvement)
France: 80 bad incidents (a whopping 20% improvement)
Austrailia: 70 bad incidents (a 12% improvement)
Japan: 50 bad incidents (a 16% improvement)
Thus, the US only had a 4% reduction in these bad incidents compared to an average of 16% improvement for the other countries studied, so the US is the "worst" even though its actual rate of the bad incidents is less than half of that of the next closest country, and less than a third of that of the country that showed the greatest improvement. Furthermore, France did best in the study with its 20% improvement, but it still sucks worse than any of the other countries "studied".
I am not suggesting that these are the actual numbers or ratios for the preventable deaths per capita or whatever measure is used for the various countries. I am pointing out how a particular measure can be highlighted in a research study to distort reality. This news story takes a statistic but fails to provide any context to substantiate the conclusion that the statistic is used to support.
Kinda like happily putting Jews on trains so it they were no longer responsible.
Yeah, and their system is about to explode/go broke.
They can't afford it, so stay tuned for the huge collapse.
What the authors aren’t saying is that french socialist health-care system is fastly fading away STRONGLY weakening the economy(the worst of western europe)with even more huge taxes and discouraging young doctors to settle down.
This is only a socialist fiction who is dying.
BTW i would be interested by the details of the “study”
It’s not health care. It’s the insurance companies. When people have to spend $1500 a month for a family of four, insurance companies are charging too much. Health care is fine, it’s the cost that is killing us.
I know folks from an online support group for Kidney Cancer patients in UK and Canada who have to wait months for MRI's and CT Scans. Patients in UK who could have their lives extended by years by a drug called Sutent that has been available in the US for several years now that the NHS in UK considers experimental. It's one of a very small handful of drugs that have been effective at all in treating Kidney Cancer and they simply can't get it over there. Damn it, don't tell me we're last in the Industrialized World in healthcare...that's just a damned lie.
Sorry, but this study is a load of crap. If we come in dead last, why do the leaders of so many other nations come to the US for medical treatment?
The only thing that might skew this “study” might be the fact that liberals consider “healthcare” to mean “health coverage”, when it is not. Healthcare is the care of your health, i.e. medical care. Health coverage is your health insurance.
Well those weren't preventable by better medical care, only by better air conditioning -- which contributes to global warming. So those deaths don't count.
Help us poor under cared for people.
Send Bordeaux, Chateau Neuf de Pap.
Cases and cases!
Au Secours!
BS
sans the antifreeze, please...
Because everyone dies. I wouldn’t call a death after 75 a premature one.
what about preventable dental problems for france and england?
By next week, some place like the Cato institute will rip this report to shreds.. I’ll wait for the rebuttal.
It’s not about Health “care”. It’s about $$$.
These comparisons are silly.
The biggest factor in the number of "preventable deaths" in the U.S. compared to other industrialized nations is our lower population density. The problem with "access to health care" in many parts of the U.S. is a function of the rural character of large portions of this country, not a lack of medical insurance.
This is why, for example, deaths in auto accidents have become very rare in a place like New York City -- which has very heavy traffic as well as some of the worst drivers on the planet. It's simply not that easy to die in a car accident if your accident occurs in close proximity to some of the top trauma centers in the world.
If you look at any list of nations in the world as ranked according to the alleged quality of their health care systems, at the top of the list you'll find a disproportionate number of densely-populated countries among them -- including Japan, Singapore, Malta, Luxembourg, etc.
Well, giving the French their due, they might not be fighters but they’ve always been on the forefront of medicine. From Louis Pasteur on France and the USA have played leap-frog to see who’s ahead in medicine.
Your analysis is probably correct but someone (not me) should take the time to read the full study and report back to the group.
Yeah, how about all those technological, procedural, pharmaceutical advances along with that great medical research that comes out of France.
“I’d bet that the willingness of US doctors to deploy heroic measures, especially in the cases of premature births, effectively skews US rankings. After all, heroic measures that fail are ineffective”
Totally right.
THis is the important line from the article -
-—The researchers found that while most countries surveyed saw preventable deaths decline by an average of 16 percent, the United States saw only a four percent dip.-—
We already did better than them and thus had less to improve!
Also the Euronuts don’t count premature babies who die after birth in their infant mortality stats. We do.
It’s a false statistic based on apples and oranges data.
Ho hum. I’m sure Barak Hussein and Shrillary will be touting it today, as will Mitt Flopp when pimping his fascist healthcare plane.
This article is a lesson in junk science.
Rich (and middle class) French people come to the USA for treatment.
That’s all one needs to know.
“It’s not health care. It’s the insurance companies. When people have to spend $1500 a month for a family of four, insurance companies are charging too much. Health care is fine, it’s the cost that is killing us.”
It’s government intervention in the free market that caused this.
“The researchers found that while most countries surveyed saw preventable deaths decline by an average of 16 percent, the United States saw only a four percent dip”
It sounds like a baloney bogus statistic to me. All it implies to me is that things were already so good here we couldn’t improve as fast. I smell an interest group pushing their socialist agenda.
“The researchers found that while most countries surveyed saw preventable deaths decline by an average of 16 percent, the United States saw only a four percent dip”
It sounds like a baloney bogus statistic to me. All it implies to me is that things were already so good here we couldn’t improve as fast. I smell an interest group pushing their socialist agenda.
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