Current Events > LOL at studies that say the US has the worst health care in the world

(+) Yeah! (+)

such as this one: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-17/australian-healthcare-ranked-second-best-in-developed-world/8716326

yes the cost/health insurance situation in the US is not good... but the US has by far the best health care in the world
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how are they ranking it

Why did Kobe go to Germany for his knee surgery?

There is a striking contrast between the U.S’s poor performance on infant mortality, life expectancy, and amenable mortality and its relatively better performance on in-hospital mortality after heart attack or stroke. Researchers have noted that the only modest decline in the rate of amenable mortality in the U.S. may be attributable to better management, once diagnosed, of hypertension and cerebrovascular disease that lead to cardiovascular mortality. 8 These findings highlight the combined impact of a lack of universal insurance coverage and barriers to accessing primary care, and suggest that the U.S. could make gains by investing more in preventing chronic disease.

tl;dr - the US spends the most on healthcare but its outcomes are the worst when you look at rates of infant mortality, life expectancy past age 60, and ability to offer preventative treatment rather than just doing reactive treatment
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Romulox28 posted...

tl;dr - the US spends the most on healthcare but its outcomes are the worst when you look at rates of infant mortality, life expectancy past age 60, and ability to offer preventative treatment rather than just doing reactive treatment

couldn't that be a comment on our overall health, and not necessarily healthcare?

culture, diet etc?

I bet the overall score was something like quality out of ten minus cost out of 100, so that places with no healthcare whatsoever would rank higher by hitting zero.
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the US has some of the worst rates of annual doctor's visits, preventive health care (wait is that redundant from my previous statement Idunno) and all that other good stuff in the health industry in the developed world, this really isn't super debatable unless you are one of those weirdos who can't take any serious criticism of American practices.
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Kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it? If it is unattainable the quality really doesn't matter.

Since it's illegal to not have insurance, I don't see a lot of law-abiding citizens finding it unattainable.

But since not having insurance became illegal, insurance prices have also gotten unconscionable.
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Milkman5 posted...

Romulox28 posted...

tl;dr - the US spends the most on healthcare but its outcomes are the worst when you look at rates of infant mortality, life expectancy past age 60, and ability to offer preventative treatment rather than just doing reactive treatment

couldn't that be a comment on our overall health, and not necessarily healthcare?

culture, diet etc?

no

this study is ranked on 5 criteria:

Care Process - US actually did decent on this, ranked 5th out of 11

Access - US is ranked dead last for this, the most unaffordable healthcare in the developed world

Administrative Efficiency - US is second to last here, has a ton of reported problems with going through the healthcare process

Equity - US is dead last here again, there's a huge disparity for services offered to low income and high income Americans

Health Care Outcomes - Dead last again; U.S. has the highest rate of mortality amenable to health care and has experienced the smallest reduction in that measure during the past decade


so basically everything but the physical medical treatment you receive in the US is the worst in the developed world lol. lifestyle choices don't come into play here as much I think, it's mostly about accessing the healthcare, who can get it, how easily can they get it, and are the outcomes worth it
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Not having insurance isn't illegal >.>
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DevsBro posted...

Since it's illegal to not have insurance, I don't see a lot of law-abiding citizens finding it unattainable.

But since not having insurance became illegal, insurance prices have also gotten unconscionable.

Getting an exception to not have insurance is easy and it's a hard law to enforce as the people who can't afford it aren't exactly high on the federal government's list of people to keep an eye on financially.

Insurance prices have always gone consistently up, that's what happens when some assholes realize they can afford to charge absurd prices to people who might die. The Free Market is great in some things, health care is not one of them but we keep trying anyway.
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BREAKING: America is trash

MORE @ 11
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Reminder that every leftist attempt at improving access to healthcare has made it more expensive. And attempting to hide that behind taxation wouldn't make it any cheaper.

Transcendentia posted...

Reminder that every leftist attempt at improving access to healthcare has made it more expensive.

The ACA was written by the Heritage Foundation and implemented on the state level by Mitt Romney. And healthcare would be a lot more expensive for most folks if the poorest and oldest weren't covered by Medicaid and Medicare and the private sector had to account for them. Those aren't leftist policies, but they're more left-leaning at any rate.
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The current system means there are significant numbers of people effectively locked out of being able to get insurance or affordable healthcare. I don't think any other first world country has that situation for it's people.

Transcendentia posted...

Reminder that every leftist attempt at improving access to healthcare has made it more expensive. And attempting to hide that behind taxation wouldn't make it any cheaper.

Wrong, Medicaid and Medicare are very successful programs that control costs and have high satisfaction rates with way less red tape than private insurance. I work in the field and can confirm this to be true.
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Asherlee10 posted...

How are they locked out?

They cannot afford their premiums or deductibles without significant impacts to their budget for other necessities. People go without care until absolutely necessary, and even then...

As an emergency medicine physician in a busy urban hospital, I have patients brought to me unconscious several times a day. Often, they are found down in the street by a good Samaritan who called 911 on their behalf. We are required to care for them, and most of these patients are grateful at my attempts to help them. More than once, however, such patients have regained consciousness furious. It wasn%u2019t that they didn%u2019t want to live %u2014 they were all simply upset at the costs their hospitalization incurred.

Last week I took care of a middle-school teacher who was out jogging on a hot June day. Dehydrated, she lost consciousness when some tourists called an ambulance over to her. A month before that, I cared for a young man who passed out at his desk from a bleeding ulcer in his colon. His co-workers called 911 while he lay in a puddle of his own blood. And about one year ago, I cared for a 56-year-old patient who was found lying in the gutter at 3 a.m. A passer-by called 911 thinking he was drunk. It turns out he had been hit on the head with an iron rod by muggers while on his way home from work as a waiter.
...
Most dismaying for me as a physician is that after all of my attempts to apply my compassion and training to save their lives, all three of these patients told me some variant of: %u201CThanks for what you%u2019re doing, but I would rather that you hadn%u2019t.%u201D Even the man with the brain bleed, who certainly would have died without our immediate intervention, expressed dismay. In the neurology intensive care unit, with a bolt through his skull to measure the pressure around his brain, he told me that while he did not have health insurance, he did have life insurance. He said he would rather have died and his family gotten that money than have lived and burdened them with the several-hundred-thousand-dollar bill, and likely bankruptcy, he was now stuck with.

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Asherlee10 posted...

Isn't that where the exchange comes into play?

Not as much as you think. The exchange was gutted and changed through legislation to the point where it just houses a marketplace for plans that are considered "QHP Plans" which is just a bare minimum set of requirements of what the plan must offer. On few occasions, it does offer plans that are lower than what was being paid for. Tax Credits don't do much to stem the cost either. Medicaid or S/CHIP is probably the most favorable outcome.

More often than not, you are better off finding a job that carries health insurance as a benefit.
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Originally it was meant to be similar to Windows Defender is to AVs in that there would be a social option to buy that would be low cost and bare minimum coverage as a way to force insurance companies to compete better.

Insurance companies saw that as a threat and lobbied GOP to fight against that. The current gutted ACA was the end result of that. The original idea never existed outside of theroycrafting.
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We spent $574.2 billion on Medicaid in 2016.

Life Sympathy posted...

Originally it was meant to be similar to Windows Defender is to AVs in that there would be a social option to buy that would be low cost and bare minimum coverage as a way to force insurance companies to compete better.

Insurance companies saw that as a threat and lobbied GOP to fight against that.

To clarify: GOP efforts against the public option did not matter. It was Joe Lieberman, a Democrat, who caused it to be dropped from the ACA.
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A lot were chopped by democrats as a result of concessions to get GOP party members to vote in favor of it.
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Antifar posted...

Life Sympathy posted...

Originally it was meant to be similar to Windows Defender is to AVs in that there would be a social option to buy that would be low cost and bare minimum coverage as a way to force insurance companies to compete better.

Insurance companies saw that as a threat and lobbied GOP to fight against that.

To clarify: GOP efforts against the public option did not matter. It was Joe Lieberman, a Democrat, who caused it to be dropped from the ACA.

also worth noting that nelson and landrieu stood with him on that

and lieberman is an independent who caucuses with dems
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Life Sympathy posted...

A lot were chopped by democrats as a result of concessions to get GOP party members to vote in favor of it.

No Republicans in Congress voted for it. Nor, clearly, were they needed in order to pass the bill.
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Transcendentia posted...

We spent $574.2 billion on Medicaid in 2016.

We spend that much on defense and nobody bats an eye even though not much of that money goes to a single soldier.
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_OujiDoza_ posted...

Transcendentia posted...

We spent $574.2 billion on Medicaid in 2016.

We spend that much on defense and nobody bats an eye even though not much of that money goes to a single soldier.

That's defense for an entire nation plus allies. Medicare spending is only for a small subset of the population, yet it's still insanely expensive despite what some CEmen in this topic said about costs being better.

We spend $574.2 billion on around 80 million people. If you remove the children from the equation, that number goes down to a little under 50 million.

If we scaled that to everyone in the country, the cost would likely be 5x-10x more expensive. Maybe more. The federal government received 3.6 trillion in direct revenue last year. So this quickly becomes a bankruptcy scenario.

Transcendentia posted...

Medicare spending is only for a small subset of the population, yet it's still insanely expensive despite what some CEmen in this topic said about costs being better.

We spend $574.2 billion on around 80 million people. If you remove the children from the equation, that number goes down to a little under 50 million.

If we scaled that to everyone in the country, t

You really should not scale the healthcare costs for the oldest and poorest subsets of society to everyone in the country. They require more healthcare than the general population.
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Transcendentia posted...

If we scaled that to everyone in the country, the cost would likely be 5x-10x more expensive. Maybe more. The federal government received 3.6 trillion in direct revenue last year. So this quickly becomes a bankruptcy scenario.

source for the multiplier: your butt

keep in mind that medicare customers are much more expensive than the average customer. ditto for medicaid.
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It isn't illegal, you can opt out rather easily.

Yes, I suppose you can also opt out of observing the speed limit for a fine.
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My W-2 showed a rather pathetic amount going to public healthcare services. I'm not concerned with it.
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The fact that 28 million people don't have health insurance should clue you in to it not being illegal in any real sense of that word.
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Yeah generally the quality of health care is pretty good.

It's the access/cost and insurance system that people have problems with

Opting out of insurance nets you a penalty with the IRS. It does not count as a police charge or jail time or whatever. Assuming the current ACA stays in place, that penalty is scheduled to go up each year.
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Antifar posted...

You really should not scale the healthcare costs for the oldest and poorest subsets of society to everyone in the country. They require more healthcare than the general population.

This is true, except the cost increases need to take into account the increased need for facilities and personnel, plus the overhead of more bureaucracy and chaos in the system.

Darkman124 posted...

source for the multiplier: your butt

keep in mind that medicare customers are much more expensive than the average customer. ditto for medicaid.

It'll need to scale at least 4x to 5x to accommodate the population delta. Then the rest is for all the bureaucracy and overhead and facilities and personnel that come hand in hand with anything the government does. Government projects are expensive.

Life Sympathy posted...

My W-2 showed a rather pathetic amount going to public healthcare services. I'm not concerned with it.

What percentage of your total income was it?

Milkman5 posted...

Romulox28 posted...

tl;dr - the US spends the most on healthcare but its outcomes are the worst when you look at rates of infant mortality, life expectancy past age 60, and ability to offer preventative treatment rather than just doing reactive treatment

couldn't that be a comment on our overall health, and not necessarily healthcare?

culture, diet etc?

How are those at all lifestyle related?
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Antifar posted...

The fact that 28 million people don't have health insurance should clue you in to it not being illegal in any real sense of that word.

They can't make it illegal in any real sense of the word because then they'd have to imprison a bunch of people who can't afford insurance.

Transcendentia posted...

plus the overhead of more bureaucracy and chaos in the system.

Medicare spends less on overhead than the private sector.
http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2011/09/20/medicare-is-more-efficient-than-private-insurance/
http://www.accuracy.org/release/medicares-50-years-of-low-overhead-vs-acas-increasing-bureaucratic-bloat-merger-mania/

Last week the trustees of the Medicare program, whose 50th anniversary is this Thursday (see accuracy.org/calendar), released their annual report. It showed that traditional Medicare overhead amounts are about 2 percent of the program’s expenditures. That figure sharply contrasts with the 12 percent to 14 percent overhead typical of private health insurance companies. [PDF]

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-column-miller-medicare-idUSBRE87E15N20120815

Although we hear plenty about fraud and abuse in Medicare - which is a legitimate area of concern - the program is dramatically more efficient than private insurance. Medicare spent just 1.4 percent of every dollar on administrative overhead, even including money spent to fight fraud and abuse, compared with 25 percent overhead in private plans, according to Richard Kaplan, a professor at the University of Illinois College of Law who specializes in elder law matters.

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Antifar posted...

Medicare spends less on overhead than the private sector.
http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2011/09/20/medicare-is-more-efficient-than-private-insurance/
http://www.accuracy.org/release/medicares-50-years-of-low-overhead-vs-acas-increasing-bureaucratic-bloat-merger-mania/

Even if that's true, that's completely irrelevant to what I said. I said that scaling medicare to cover the entire population would bring more overhead and bureaucracy and chaos in the system. Which is true.

btw it's funny that you pit Medicare against the private sector. didn't you know that Medicare health providers are all private facilities and private doctors? the government just pays the bills.

Transcendentia posted...

Antifar posted...

Medicare spends less on overhead than the private sector.
http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2011/09/20/medicare-is-more-efficient-than-private-insurance/
http://www.accuracy.org/release/medicares-50-years-of-low-overhead-vs-acas-increasing-bureaucratic-bloat-merger-mania/

Even if that's true, that's completely irrelevant to what I said. I said that scaling medicare to cover the entire population would bring more overhead and bureaucracy and chaos in the system. Which is true.

Making things bigger will increase overhead. Shocking! What an amazing revelation... that means exactly jack and shit without comparing it to alternatives.
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Transcendentia posted...

It'll need to scale at least 4x to 5x to accommodate the population delta.

again

the population you're talking about adding cost less per person than medicare/medicaid customers, by a great deal.

https://archive.ahrq.gov/research/findings/factsheets/costs/expriach/

5% of the population account for 49% of the cost.
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Do such studies take into consideration the high rate of Christian dumbos in America who would rather pray over a dying child than take them to hospital skewering the mortality rate?

Romulox28 posted...

tl;dr - the US spends the most on healthcare but its outcomes are the worst when you look at rates of infant mortality, life expectancy past age 60, and ability to offer preventative treatment rather than just doing reactive treatment

We count infant mortality rate as x
Death before 2 years, for pretty much any reason. Other countries count only if it dies in the hospital and others 90 days after birth.

Apart of what makes us look worse is we use more strict definitions for most statistics. Of course we still have significant problems in regards to health care. But it's not really the quality offered that is our problem.
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