This is a much repeated but blatantly false trope.
For life saving care you are strictly better off in Canada, Australia or Britain.
For elective surgery you can probably get it done faster in the US if you have money but the standard of care isn't different. There are in-fact places that embrace even more medical capitalism than the US but with less middleman, lobbying and nonsense - take Thailand for instance, or South Korea. Both of which offer elective medical procedures for less than the US, no wait times, equivalent standard of care served with a side of luxury.
So yeah, utter drivel as usual, the US system is inferior by all metrics and insurance lobbyists have duped conservative Americans into voting for something that is strictly against their interests.
Conservative politicians the world over have perfected the art of getting turkeys to vote for Christmas.
> For life saving care you are strictly better off in Canada, Australia or Britain.
I don't remember a single OECD measure that the US falls behind the UK in, perhaps child mortality at birth, so I'd be interested to know which life saving care you're referring to.
Moreover, as the nurse was teaching my class (in London) how to give CPR said "if you're going to have a heart attack, have it in America (because your chances of survival will be higher".
But maternal death (The number of person who die from pregnancy-related causes) is also more than 10 times higher than comparable countries and was raising for 20 years while other comparable countries were lowering it.
It seems an even worse picture of the situation. Adult women dying at 10 times the rate of OECD countries because of pregnancy. It will probably raise again given the new limitations/bans on abortion (accessible abortion is correlated with lower maternal death)
Life expectancy in the US is quite lower than comparable countries and stopped growing (but it might be related to the 8 to 10 times higher homicide rate than other OECD countries)
Death rate from HIV/AIDS is nearly 6 times higher than the UK and it’s not lowering anymore (it has plateaued at a much higher level than comparable countries)
Is there a health measure that you can find where the US is better or at least at the same level than say UK or at least France? (which is sadly for us French not the best in class…)
Not a trick question, I’m curious to see if the US have some outlier health measure that it aces, sometimes it happens!
> Not a trick question, I’m curious to see if the US have some outlier health measure that it aces, sometimes it happens!
I appreciate that, no worries.
Without looking I would go for any cancer statistic, as the UK is often terrible in those[1]. So, I did a search of the OECD Health Care Quality Indicators[2] (as they're the ones used to compare countries) to see if I was right. (As an aside, I look at these every few years and the last time I looked I found some surprising stats, like the ones about child mortality in the States, but occasionally there's a more complex reason behind a poor statistic[3]). Anyway, it seems I was (sadly) right:
## Breast cancer 5 year net survival
France 86.8 87.2 86.7
United Kingdom 79.8 83.8 85.6
United States 88.9 89.8 90.2
## Colon cancer 5 year net survival
France 60.7 63.6 63.7
United Kingdom 52.0 56.5 60.0
United States 64.7 65.5 64.9
Those are the age-standardised survival (%) spread across 3 different time periods (I didn't want to have to reproduce the whole thing so you don't get everything labelled!:)
Anyway, those are the first two I looked at. I've done this before and honestly, the US system holds up very well. I'm sure it does even better if it's adjusted for economic class - which obviously opens up a barrel of probably quite fair criticism. I know that some on here complain about how the US can bankrupt you if you get sick, but I'd take that over the UK's system in a heart beat. Not sure about France, though it does seem to have a more sane system than the UK.
5 year survival is not a particularly useful statistic though. Those people are not living longer, they're being diagnosed earlier. The all cause mortality hasn't been changed. Rates of regret for cancer treatment are quite high - people at the end of their life sometimes wish they'd spent more time doing stuff with family and less time getting unpleasant and painful treatment in hospital.
If you take every man over the age of 55 and provide rigorous diagnosis for prostate cancer, but you then provide zero treatment to anyone, your 5 year survival rates suddenly look really good. This is because you've diagnosed a lot of slow growing cancer that doesn't kill people. But obviously you've done nothing to improve all cause mortality or quality of life.
> Our findings suggest that there are no reliable relationships between changes in 5-year survival and cancer incidence or mortality. Increases in 5-year survival might therefore represent poor indicators of progress in cancer control at the population level. In the absence of over-diagnosis, 5-year survival might only indicate improved diagnosis and treatment in clinical practice.
Talking about health and healthcare, the facts show the US is at or very near the worst among OECD countries in: infant mortality, child health and safety, life expectancy at birth, healthy life expectancy, disability-adjusted life years, doctors per 1000 people, deaths from treatable conditions, rate of mental health disorders, rate of drug abuse, rate of prescription drug use.
Those measures might not be as damning as they first appear, as the reasons behind them can be complex. For example, rate of mental health disorders may be a case of the diagnosis fallacy, where an increased number of mental health professionals and access to mental health services means there are a greater number of mental health diagnoses. Just as a greater number of mental health diagnoses will occur in hospitals than at home, this does not mean that hospitals are dangerous for your mental health (although they may be;)
Life expectancy at birth is affected greatly by, among other things, gun violence in young men (I already shared in another comment an overview[2] of a paper[1] showing how this works). There is a quote[3] in the Guardian by the paper's lead author:
> “I was surprised by the sheer magnitude of the impact of firearm deaths, that they’re only 1%-2% of deaths in the US but responsible for 20% of the gap in life expectancy between the US and other countries in men,” said Andrew Fenelon, the lead author of the letter.
It's not enough to compare simple, bare statistics and come to a judgement that US healthcare is failing compared to other countries based on just that. I'm not an advocate for the US system but I do get the feeling that it can be unjustly maligned at times.
> Those measures might not be as damning as they first appear, as the reasons behind them can be complex. For example, rate of mental health disorders may be a case of the diagnosis fallacy, where an increased number of mental health professionals and access to mental health services means there are a greater number of mental health diagnoses.
Are you suggesting that the US is a special case among the 38 member countries of the OECD, and is the only one that has this phenomenon?
> Life expectancy at birth is affected greatly by, among other things, gun violence in young men
Which is just another way of saying the US needs better healthcare to deal with this major issue that it alone faces.
A bit confusing because the hospitals in Boston have wings for foreigners with luxury accommodations, and people all over the world fly in to get top-tier procedures done. My son was born with complications and my insurance paid for all of it at such a top-tier Boston hospital (I am a Boston resident and US citizen). So maybe things aren’t so simple.
The existence of very expensive private care in the US isn't counter to my point if anything it's an embodiment of it.
Furthermore it's probably much more expensive than you realize.
Premium contributions and deductibles totaled 11.6% of median income in 2020, compared to 2% Medicare levy in Australia across the income spectrum.
The US system isn't defendable. You can say things like "Well I'm rich so it works for me" but you can't make assertions that it's good as a whole.
I will assert that the US medical system has pros and cons, and I would advocate for significant structural reform.
But such reform has not occurred despite decades of trying, and that’s because the system is not without the pros, and the pros make it infeasible to reform it at this time.
Pretending that the system is completely useless and broken is ignoring basic facts - such as overwhelming majorities of Americans that like their primary care doctor and their current insurance.
So it’s difficult to make such clear statements when the facts disagree with the progressive shrieking.
> When the family of a 35-year-old disabled man who resorted to euthanasia arrived at the care home where he lived, they encountered ‘urine on the floor… spots where there was feces on the floor… spots where your feet were just sticking. Like, if you stood at his bedside and when you went to walk away, your foot was literally stuck.’ According to the Canadian government, the assisted suicide law is about ‘prioritis[ing] the individual autonomy of Canadians’; one may wonder how much autonomy a disabled man lying in his own filth had in weighing death over life.
The world is very complex and nothing is black and white
That is part of the problem, you have taken something that can be measured objectively and instead politicised it. Not a uniquely American phenomenon but definitely practiced most commonly there.
The system is without pros but that doesn't matter because of the existence of lobbyists. The American political system assigns representation proportionally by wealth of interests, that is just how it is.
You can see it play out over and over again from tobacco, oil, healthcare etc. Preservation of outsized corporate profits at the expense of normal people is simply the norm in America and is ingrained in its political system.
It has nothing to do with the pros and cons of actual healthcare provided to people (or the cost at which that care is provided), simply that those that stand to lose from making the system more efficient are willing to spend anything and everything to prevent that from happening.
Unfortunately too much of the American population are happy to be duped into thinking the current system is good in some way AND that they should tie their political identity to it's preservation regardless of the facts.
It's a tragedy tbh but maybe one day logic and economics will win out. Spending this much of GDP on healthcare is just stupidly inefficient, especially when you still have so many simply not seeking care because of the financial ramifications of doing so - cheating the economy out of their productivity.
But such reform has not occurred despite decades of trying, and that’s because the system is not without the pros, and the pros make it infeasible to reform it at this time.
This seems like a faulty assertion. It’s possible that this system offers benefits to some subset of people. But you can’t really draw much of a conclusion simply from its continued existence.
If one of your “pro”s is “makes so much profit for insurance companies that they are willing to spend huge amounts of money to fight reform”… well, I can’t imagine that’s really what you mean by “pro”.
It is also a game of super-sub-specialization. The entire field. There essentially numerous subspecialties within each specialty.
Some surgeons do nothing but the same apnea surgery 5 times a day. Some oncologists do nothing but specific neuroendocrine cancers all day. Some diagnosticians are good for a specific area of their field - and utterly useless elsewhere, because they just couldn’t care less and want to work on what they find interesting. Just like anyone else.
If you want to see someone who actually knows what they are doing, sees the same exact issue you are having 10 times per day instead of once per decade, you WILL travel. Of course, you can always settle for the clueless doctor nearby who will do the bare minimum, or maybe even nothing.
Remember: patient outcomes are not part of the standard of care. There are no real incentives to do better than bare minimum, as a physician.
Sometimes the talent is in Switzerland. Sometimes Germany. Korea has some leading talents in niche areas.
It just so happens that the US pays the best, and just like engineers who can write their ticket that move to Bay Area, so do the physicians that move to the US.
Real life example: many neonatal surgeons only begin practising on their own, independently, in literally their late 30s, if not 40s. In training until then, whew. Slightly different than picking up a new JavaScript framework.
Would you seek to maximise your income if you had to study for 20 years after high school?
Neonatal surgery is often $1-2 million per surgery. There are only a handful of such centres. Only some of them operated on a specific condition more than 10 times.
The same really goes for anything else from diagnostic to operators. Even in the US, you’d often have to travel out of state if you want to get a proper opinion. Easier with imaging or biopsies because these can be mailed. Tons of people travel for surgeries.
250k Canadians every year travel to the US to get care they cannot get on time (or at all) at home. I’ve seen it all, even Saudis flying over for dental work.
Next time you see your doctor ask them who would they pick for their surgery: someone who does the procedure 100x per year, or someone who maybe does 1-2 cases per year. Then guess where the most super-specialized talent can maximise their income. Probably not the remote Australia with a population of ~10% of the US.
US simply has the best talent. If you can afford it.
As for Canada/NHS/Australia being better - that’s just laughable. Canada is actually dead last among top 10 richest countries, and happens to have the second highest drug prices after Switzerland. Also has as many beds per capita as Mexico. You’d be better off going literally anywhere else.
Mayo at Rochester has a larger diagnostic antibody library than anything in those three countries combined, and can arrive at your diagnosis within two days instead of two decades. Guess where your tertiary centre in Canada/Aus/Uk often mails your blood work and biopsies once they are at the end of the rope?
Medicine isn't a business as far as a government is concerned.
It's a utility that exists to protect the investment in it's citizens such that their full productivity can be achieved.
It's in a country's best interest to achieve the highest possible standard of care for all citizens, not just those that can "afford it".
Treating medicine as a business only works for the very top of the totem pole and over time leads to increasing degradation of the labor force. i.e what you are seeing in America right now.
Nobody in Australia ever wonders if they should call an ambulance if they are injured or worried they could be very ill, they just pick up the phone and dial 000. They are guaranteed as citizens of Australia to have access to life saving care whenever and wherever in our borders. They do so with no fear that they will financially ruin themselves.
In Australia we would go as far to call this a basic human right.
What you are writing about is aspirational utopian fantasy.
What I wrote is harsh reality informed by two decades of being elbow deep in bodily fluids.
You may not like it, but you aren’t getting the best physician just because you developed some far out ideas how the best talent in the world must fix your problems.
Guess what, physicians are free people too, even free to refuse any patient for any reason.
They just want top dollar, and move where the pay is best, that’s all.
You wouldn’t move for a 10x higher salary? You would deny everything that would bring to your family?
> Remember: patient outcomes are not part of the standard of care.
LMAO, what? It's literally, and defined as the end product of an acceptable standard of care, and used to judge whether a standard of care was given to a patient.
> Probably not the remote Australia with a population of ~10% of the US.
Victor Chang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Chang) would have liked a word with you. Trained in the US. But still set up shop in Australia. Considered the world's leading heart transplant surgeon, with survival rates well into the 90%s.
> Guess where your tertiary centre in Canada/Aus/Uk often mails your blood work and biopsies once they are at the end of the rope? That’s right. USA.
Because of course you mention tertiary centres as if any of those three don't actually have primary research facilities. A tertiary hospital in Australia isn't mailing shit to the US for diagnostics. In the event that they can't figure it out, there's many many state of the art facilities available.
All of this reads like some weird xeophobic libertarian fever dream, and the notion of Canadian, Australian healthcare systems as some primitive backwater barely discovering modern medicine is laughably ignorant.
Even in formerly communist countries bribes got you better access.
As soon as you can figure out how to prevent people trying to leverage every resource they have and try to outcompete others to avoid death, let us know. you might get a Nobel.