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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (5579)	1/10/2017 4:48:56 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 354650

A few issues; 1. America counts infant mortality differently than some European nations. A baby which dies in the first day is stillborn in some European countries (Don't have the list on hand.) It is considered to have a lifespan of <1 day in the states. And consequently, we save more premies as well (who are generally less healthy.) 2. America has more immigrants, who have more health problems, are more likely to be poor, and who were often malnourished as children. 3. Diet and lifestyle considerations are worth considering. (What effect does US reliance on high fructose corn syrup have?) What about relative rates of drug use? Japanese Americans who keep their traditional diet have lifespans comparable to those living in Japan, suggesting that the healthcare system is not the primary operative factor in determining lifespan. 4. The effectiveness of the healthcare system should consider those exposed to it and the relative rates of effectiveness. "Lifespan" obscures the issue, for those reasons mentioned. If you're interested in how often gunshot victims are saved in the US and Europe, for instance, it would make more sense to compare those things directly. 5. America doesn't have price controls on drugs as Europe does, so we fund their drug development. (Whether we incent research in a good direction is an open question. Japanese use of proteolytic enzymes like serrapeptase for pain reduction and antibiotic augmentation seems more elegant than a lot of American solutions, which over-rely on drugs and technology.) 6. The US tends to be more litigious than Europe. This can raise costs via malpractice insurance and also via defensive medicine. (I'm not in favor of Nevada style tort reform. I'd like any tort reform tied strongly into incentives to disclose errors and compensate victims prior to a court trial.) 7. Caps on things like doctor pay can be effective in the short term, but create a doctor shortage in the long term. I'm not familiar with the statistics on this, but it seems a productive place to look. 8. I'm curious, how do you calculate spending under a government subsidized system? It's common for one government agency to offload certain portions of their paperwork to a different agency. The cost is still there, though. theatlantic.com

To: TimF who wrote (5579)	1/10/2017 5:27:20 PM
From: KyrosL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 354650

My own opinion, having observed a rather threadbare national health system (in Greece) and comparing it to the US, is that one of the key differences is the emphasis on prevention and early diagnosis, which overcomes qualitative deficits in complicated and expensive (but usually rare) procedures -- Greeks by the way live 2 years longer than Americans in spite their relative poverty . The difference in infant mortality can be summed up in two words: prenatal care. Prenatal care is cheap and extremely effective in preventing low birth weight and other problems that plague US newborns, and result in health care costs many times what it would cost to have free universal prenatal care -- costs that are picked up by the tax payers in the final analysis regardless of the insurance status of the patients. And these costs do not include the staggering costs of educating and caring for impaired individuals for life.