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

To: TimF who wrote (2799)	11/9/2007 3:24:37 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 42652

And other factors, only some of which we have good relevant statistics for. There's so much complexity in this. I've been reflecting on it more given that my dad recently died. So here's a personal anecdote. My father died of prostate cancer, officially. He had Medicare, a form of universal care, plus a supplemental HMO, so he was not uninsured. A couple of years ago, he opted to discontinue a treatment because the cost to him was about $1200 a year and he didn't want to pay it. He could have afforded it, easily, but he didn't want to. Had he continued that treatment, he might have lived longer. More recently, he chose hospice care. He could have lived longer had he fought the cancer actively but he chose not to. And even more recently, he chose to stop eating. He would certainly have lived longer had he not done that. He was 94. How do you compare his longevity with a similarly situated Frenchman? Who knows. Lots of individual decisions. It's not just insured vs not insured. He has two sisters who I have discovered have never had a colonoscopy. I'm twenty some years their junior and I've had 4. They have been offered them, encouraged to get them by their providers, but have opted not to. I can't seem to talk either of them into it. How many Canadian women their age get colonoscopies? More or fewer? Why or why not? Who knows what that does to the comparative stats. We don't know how many individuals in the two models choose to fight to the end or choose hospice. We don't know how many individuals have tests or treatments available to them but opt out, or if that made a difference in their longevity. Simplistic conclusions don't hack it.