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

To: Eric who wrote (12294)	12/13/2009 8:06:46 PM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42652

French rocker in induced coma in Los Angeles Dec 12 09:01 AM US/Eastern By JEAN-PIERRE VERGES Associated Press Writer PARIS (AP) - French rock legend Johnny Hallyday had a botched medical operation in France and is now in a medically induced coma in a Los Angeles hospital as he recovers from surgery to fix the damage, his producer said. Hallyday, 66, is expected to recover, producer Jean-Claude Camus said. Separately, police in Paris on Saturday were investigating an alleged attack on Dr. Stephane Delajoux—the French surgeon who first operated on Hallyday—as he left a friend's home overnight, judicial officials said. Delajoux alleged that one masked man attacked him, while another stood by keeping watch, the officials said. The doctor was to go to hospital to have his facial bruises checked out on Saturday, they said. Hallyday, 66, is France's biggest rock star. He had an operation overnight Wednesday to Thursday at L.A.'s Cedars Sinai hospital to fix lingering back trouble from a Nov. 26 operation in Paris—led by Delajoux—for a herniated disc. Hallyday's press service said Thursday that lesions from the initial operation required more surgery, and that he had also suffered an infection following the first operation. Hallyday producer Jean-Claude Camus told France's TF1 television on Friday that Hallyday was put in a coma "so he won't suffer," and the outlook was positive. "The news is very positive, he's very strong," said the rocker's son David Hallyday, himself a singer, told France-Info radio as he arrived at the hospital late Friday. Camus, speaking Friday on French radio, said the American medical team treating Hallyday said the rocker had suffered ill-effects from the operation in France, and that infection "was attacking his bone marrow." "If what I'm being told in the United States is true, this operation was a massacre," he said on RTL radio. On France-Info, Camus said: "It seems the Americans fixed things that they found that were very badly done." Delajoux, through a statement from his lawyer Friday, said he was "outraged" by such allegations and insisted that his surgery had "taken place perfectly." Hallyday lawyer Virginie Lappe said the singer is not ruling out the possibility of legal action. As for the alleged attack on Delajoux, his lawyer Herve Temime criticized a "manhunt" against the doctor, though he stopped short of making any claim that the attack and the allegedly flawed surgery were connected. "Whether there's a link or not, the man hunt that he's faced over the last 24 to 48 hours has been despicable," Temime said on France-Info. Police officials said Delajoux alleged to have been tracked by paparazzi. Hallyday had been on a multi-city tour in France called "Route 66," a reference to his age and a homage to the American rock that has inspired his music. The tour is billed as his last. Beyond his music, Belgian-born Hallyday—whose real name is Jean-Philippe Smet—is best known for his glitz, amorous affairs, Harley-Davidson motorcycles and a Frenchness as absolute as Elvis Presley's Americanness.

To: Eric who wrote (12294)	12/15/2009 7:38:55 AM
From: Brumar89	2 Recommendations Respond to of 42652

US health care still tops By BETSY MCCAUGHEY Last Updated: 3:12 PM, December 14, 2009 Posted: 2:44 AM, December 14, 2009 Some Congress members and even President Obama have been bamboozled into believing that health care is better in other developed countries than in America. On Nov. 20, for example, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) pointed to a large blue chart showing the United States in last place in health performance. "All of these countries have much lower costs than we do," he said, "and they have higher-quality outcomes than ours." Conrad was duped by a bag-of-tricks report from the Commonwealth Fund (Health Affairs, vol. 27, no. 1, 2008). This put America in 19th place due to our nation's large number of preventable deaths -- meaning deaths from diseases that are curable if treated soon enough. Yet most of these deaths are caused by heart disease and circulatory diseases. The United States has a high incidence because for 50 years Americans were the heaviest smokers and now are among the most obese. Bad behavior, not bad medicine, is to blame. Our health-care system treats these diseases very effectively. As the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded, "It seems inaccurate to attribute . . . high death rates from these causes to a poorly performing medical system." Plus, while the Commonwealth researchers claimed to consider curable diseases of all sorts, they conspicuously omitted malignant prostate cancer -- where US care is stunningly successful. An American man diagnosed with it has a 99.3 percent chance of surviving it -- far higher than in any Western European country. It's not a death sentence here, but in Scotland only 71 percent survive, in Germany, only 85 percent. Conrad also trotted out another "pro-reform" statistic, pointing to a "shorter [US] life expectancy compared with other industrialized countries." Again, demographers are quite clear on this: The causes of reduced US life expectancy are our higher rates of auto fatalities and violent crime, plus half a century of excessive smoking -- not bad medicine. As the NBER concludes, "The low longevity ranking of the United States is not likely to be the result of a poor functioning health-care system." Politically convenient studies are also hauled out to to justify big cuts to Medicare funding. Conrad and Obama himself have cited the Dartmouth Atlas Healthcare 2008 study, which purports to show that patients who get less care -- fewer days in the hospital, doctors' visits and imaging tests -- had the same medical "outcomes" as patients who got more care. But read the fine print: The Dartmouth authors arrived at their dubious conclusion by restricting their data to patients who died, tallying what was spent on chronically ill patients in the last two years of life. Lo and behold, high-spending and low-spending care produced the same result: death. The Dartmouth study did not consider patients who recovered, left the hospital and resumed active lives. Did these patients survive because they got more care? That's likely, according to evidence in the journal Circulation (November 2009). Examining patients with heart failure at six teaching hospitals in California, doctors found that hospitals providing more care saved more lives. This evidence suggests that substantial reductions in spending on Medicare patients, as the House and Senate "reform" bills propose, will cost lives. When First Lady Michelle Obama marked Breast Cancer Awareness Month at the White House, she said American health-care is "a system that only adds to the fear and stress that already comes with the disease." That's not true, but that's what she's been told. The Commonwealth Fund proclaimed the American health system is "faltering." In truth, breast cancer is diagnosed earlier in the United States and treated more aggressively. A woman diagnosed with it in America has a 90 percent chance of surviving it, higher than anywhere in Europe. In England and Germany, a woman diagnosed with the disease is twice as likely to die as in America, according to Eurocare data published in Lancet Oncology (2007). And these comparisons reflect the experiences of all women, not just those with insurance. Yet Congress pushes ahead with its health bills -- ignoring the fact that bad science will lead to costly, even dangerous laws. Betsy McCaughey is chairman of the Committee to Reduce In fection Deaths and a former New York lieutenant governor. nypost.com