| > 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. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20201111165643/https://www.nhs.u... [2]
https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=51882 [3] https://academyhealth.org/node/1891 Edit: missed off a markdown link ref |
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.
https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/98/24/1761/2521971
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5454760/
> 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.