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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (379437)	4/21/2008 9:48:59 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1587370

In most studies we are not ranked the best in the world... and a lot of what we spend is on administrative overhead not productive medicine. I don't know of any competent study on the subject, to be honest. Certainly the WHO study is absolutely bogus. But there is no one country that wins in every category. US has the best breast cancer survival rates, but doesn't do well in certain other, less common, cancers. So, one can argue that we do better at treating the big killer, but fall short with others. Some studies use life expectancy, which is not an appropriate metric (since it is influenced by things other than health care). Others cite the fact that not all Americans are given "free" health care or that not all Americans have health insurance. These, quite obviously, are not appropriate metrics for the overall health care picture. None of these studies that I've heard of takes into account the overall pain and suffering -- for example, in the United States you can have a gall bladder attack on Friday and have a cholesystectomy by Saturday -- after receiving CT scans, Pipida scans, Ultrasounds -- ALL being performed before the surgery. In countries with government run health care, this simply CANNOT happen. The best one can hope for is an injection to knock you out until the pain subsides, and to schedule the surgery weeks or months out, unless it is considered life-threatening. What I perceive to be your premise in the above remark is rather absurd, though -- that administrative overhead could be brought down by some kind of government run health care system. You cannot show me an example of an efficiently run government agency. It doesn't exist. And you will have people waiting, like they do in other countries, 6 months to get a CT scan that in the US happens overnight.