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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul Kern who wrote (105722)	3/9/2009 5:12:29 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541698

The World Health Organization's ranking of the world's health systems. For that to be useful you have to consider and support their criteria and weighting. They have a lot of cats and dogs in theirs, things like literacy and the privacy of records. My criterion would be which system offers the best chance of a favorable outcome in critical medical scenarios. Where would you have the best chance of surviving and retaining an acceptable lifestyle in a hypothetical car crash, for example, of if you have a history of early heart attacks or breast cancer in your family, or get bitten by a poisonous snake. Not that the other stuff isn't important, only that those factors are either peripheral and minor or uncertain proxies for measuring outcomes. As for any system that makes it illegal for patients to seek medical care outside the national system, that's so morally repugnant it gets an automatic failing grade from me.

To: Paul Kern who wrote (105722)	3/9/2009 6:23:58 PM
From: Cogito	Respond to of 541698

>>The World Health Organization's ranking of the world's health systems. << Paul - Woo hoo! Everybody chant with me! We're number 37! We're number 37! - Allen

To: Paul Kern who wrote (105722)	3/9/2009 8:31:44 PM
From: quehubo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541698

What a list. Would you rather be penniless and requiring medical attention in the USA or Colombia? Okay how many US citizens are traveling to Canada for medical care? Seen Deadmeat on Youtube?

To: Paul Kern who wrote (105722)	3/10/2009 1:39:04 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 541698

WHO's Fooling Who? The World Health Organization's Problematic Ranking of Health Care Systems cato.org Morocco has better healthcare than the US. WHO are you kidding? Glen Whitman, Medical Progress Today, 6-13-08 Michael Moore made great sport in his film "Sicko" of pointing out that the World Health Organization (WHO) ranked US health care a lowly 37th in the world, considerably below France and Canada. But, much like Mr. Moore himself, the rankings are far from impartial or empirically sound. Still, he's not the only one looking beyond America's borders. Presidential hopeful Barack Obama and other policymakers look to Europe for inspiration for reforming America's healthcare. Back in 2003, Mr. Obama said "I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer healthcare program," thereby endorsing the state-controlled health systems of countries such as Norway and Britain. According to the WHO, Mr. Obama was correct: in its highly influential global healthcare rankings, America scores well below the vast majority of Western European countries and even below the likes of Morocco and Costa Rica. This index is frequently cited by Democratic reformers in their quest to replace the US market system with something a little more Continental. But an examination of the index tells us more about the ideology of the authors than it does about the quality of American healthcare. The most obvious bias is that 62.5% of their weighting concerns not quality of service but equality. In other words, the rankings are less concerned with the ability of a health system to make sick people better than they are with the political consideration of achieving equal access and implementing state-controlled funding systems. One of the five factors in the calculations is called "Financial Fairness". This favours systems that charge richer people more health tax, irrespective of how much, or little, health service they use. Colombia comes top. This measure has nothing to do with the quality of healthcare, yet it counts for a quarter of the weighting. The WHO claims its rankings are a tool for comparing different means of financing healthcare systems, yet this tool inherently favours taxpayer-funded systems and gives the rankings a bias which renders comparison pointless. As a result of this bias, the US languishes in lowly 54th place on "Financial Fairness", largely explaining its poor overall position. The rankings include measures for "health level" and "responsiveness." "Health Level" is their way of saying life expectancy, while "responsiveness" refers to a survey based on "respect for persons" and elements such as speed of service, convenience and choice—yet even in these cases half the weighting is determined by considerations of equality. Thus a country with a poor level of "responsiveness" throughout the population will score higher than a country with a good level in some parts and an excellent level in others. The "health level" reliance on life expectancy is also dubious, as it is influenced by factors not related to healthcare—such as tobacco consumption, diet and so on. The fact that some Americans are obese and smoke has little to do with the healthcare system, yet these factors again drag the USA down the ranking. Americans generally believe that whatever the other problems with the US healthcare system, its standards of care are high. In the details of the rankings there is evidence to support this belief. It shows the USA as having the most responsive health system in the world but this measure makes up only a small part of the overall rankings. Also left off are typical measures of healthcare standards such as disease-specific five-year survival rates. With these, US healthcare comes off somewhat better. In 2007, British medical journal The Lancet published research showing the USA to be the best in the world for cancer survival rates, with the UK's state-controlled "single-payer" National Health Service disturbingly far behind. It showed that a man under the UK's tottering 60-year-old NHS has an 18% lower chance of survival from cancer than a man under the US system. Of course, this does not mean the US health system is perfect. There is near-consensus on the need for reform to address increasing costs, waste and the fact that too many Americans still lack insurance. But decision-makers and voters must beware of ideological arguments and rankings that falsely depict idyllic, socialist health systems. They do not exist. medicalprogresstoday.com WHO's Healthcare Rankings agoraphilia.blogspot.com agoraphilia.blogspot.com agoraphilia.blogspot.com If you want to know the value of X, then actually measuring X is better than measuring the average of X and Y, an Z. Cato clearly showed that WHO is doing the later. Or to skip the variables, Cato showed that WHO is not measuring the quality of the health care system, but the quality of health care, plus the amount that the country lives up to what WHO thinks is its potential for quality health care, plus the equality of health care (and remember improving health care for some but not for others can make the equality worse, which hurts your score even though it improves your health care system). And if people in some countries have healthier habits than other countries the health care system is blamed as if it had or should have control over people's decisions in life. They also showed that with the uncertainty levels WHO itself claims the US could be anywhere from near the best to near the worst out of the developed countries. Message 24361299