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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (656)	4/17/2005 10:43:56 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

To: CalculatedRisk who wrote (13142) 4/11/2005 7:31:02 PM From: Wharf Rat of 13690 "But this is just a sample; there's virtually no metric in which the US health care system provides better care than those of other countries, other than in care for the very rich. The reality is that the average person in the US receives mediocre care that is extremely expensive." I'll bet I have one metric in which we are number one. Cost of the bureaucracy, from gvt/ins/HMO to hospitals and doctors' offices. Lots of non-patient care jobs have been created so that some shmuck with a HS diploma can tell the doc his patient doesn't need an operation. Way too many rump sitters Message 21218554

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (656)	4/17/2005 11:34:03 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

yet rank near the bottom among industrial countries in indicators from life expectancy to infant mortality. Message 21234959 Message 21235776

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (656)	4/17/2005 1:26:23 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

The Fraser Institute, a Vancouver, B.C.-based think tank, has done yeoman's work keeping track of Canada's socialized health-care system. It has just come out with its 13th annual waiting-list survey. It shows that the average time a patient waited between referral from a general practitioner to treatment rose from 16.5 weeks in 2001-02 to 17.7 weeks in 2003. Saskatchewan had the longest average waiting time of nearly 30 weeks, while Ontario had the shortest, 14 weeks. Waiting lists also exist for diagnostic procedures such as computer tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound. Depending on what province and the particular diagnostic procedure, the waiting times can range from two to 24 weeks. As reported in a December 2003 story by Kerri Houston for the Frontiers of Freedom Institute titled "Access Denied: Canada's Healthcare System Turns Patients Into Victims," in some instances, patients die on the waiting list because they become too sick to tolerate a procedure. Houston says that hip-replacement patients often end up non-ambulatory while waiting an average of 20 weeks for the procedure, and that's after having waited 13 weeks just to see the specialist. The wait to get diagnostic scans followed by the wait for the radiologist to read them just might explain why Cleveland, Ohio, has become Canada's hip-replacement center. Adding to Canada's medical problems is the exodus of doctors. According to a March 2003 story in Canada News (www.canoe.ca), about 10,000 doctors left Canada during the 1990s. Compounding the exodus of doctors is the drop in medical school graduates. According to Houston, Ontario has chosen to turn to nurses to replace its bolting doctors. It's "creating" 369 new positions for nurse practitioners to take up the slack for the doctor shortage. townhall.com That's not GOOD care. That's BAD care. And that's a Canadian source. Canadians have higher death risk than Americans after heart attacks. The research, to be published in an upcoming issue of Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, suggests that more conservative treatments in Canada may be behind the difference in survival rates, said Padma Kaul, an epidemiologist at the University of Alberta and lead investigator of the study. Kaul found that within five years of initial treatment for a heart attack caused by a completely blocked coronary artery (about one-third of heart attacks are this type), the U.S. patients had a death rate of 19.6 per cent versus 21.4 per cent for the Canadians. That roughly two per cent difference may seem small, but on a population basis, it could represent thousands of lost lives. "One possible explanation is the difference in the revascularization rates between the two countries, and those were significantly different," said Kaul, explaining that U.S. doctors perform about three times the number of angioplasties and coronary bypass surgeries done by Canadian physicians. mediresource.sympatico.ca Eh?