Evaluating common criticisms of American health care

Here is a must-read article from my friend Matt Palumbo at the American Thinker. It’s extremely high quality. (I removed the links in my excerpt – but he linked all the sources in his post)

Excerpt:

The oft-cited “46 million uninsured” is breathtakingly easy to break down to size.  Keep in mind that there is overlap in the following statistics, as many people listed in them belong to multiple categories.  Around 10 million of the uninsured aren’t even citizens.  Another 8 million are aged 18-24, which is the group least prone to medical problems.  The average salary of a person in this age group is $31,790, so affording health care would not be a problem.  Seventeen million of the uninsured make over $50,000 a year, and within that group, 8 million make over $75,000.  These people are usually referred to as the “voluntarily uninsured.”  Another large group of these 46 million are uninsured in name only, as they are eligible for government programs that they haven’t signed up for.  Estimates on how large this group is vary, the range being from 5.4 million as estimated by the Kaiser Family Foundation to as large as one third of all the uninsured, as estimated by BlueCross BlueShield.  The number of people without care because they cannot afford it is around 6 million – still a large number, but a fraction of 46 million, and no reason to restructure the entire health care system.

Then comes the issue of lifespan.  Of all attempts to discredit the American system, lifespan has been the worst.  Although lifespan gives a good indicator of a nation’s health at a glance, it does have its problems under analysis.  We get a strange paradox when examining two statistics: life expectancy and cancer survival rates.  Estimates vary on how we rank exactly; the World Fact Book showing that we rank as poorly as 50^th worldwide.  Even the best estimates in our favor place us far behind most developed nations.  Despite this, the United States excels at cancer survival.  Of the 16 most common cancers, the United States has the highest survival rate for 13 of them.  Overall, the five-year cancer survival rate for men in the States is 66.3%, and 47.3% in Europe.  Women have an advantage too, with a survival rate of 62.9% in the States, and 55.8% in Europe.  So that said, how is it that our system takes better care of us, and doesn’t grant added lifespan to boot?  Quite simply, the lifespan measurement commonly cited doesn’t factor in many variables which shorten lifespan, many of which medical care cannot prevent.  Among these factors are murders, suicides, obesity, and accidents.

He looks at the uninsured number, the infant mortality rate, and other interesting things in the article, showing how the statistics that impugn the US health care system have been misused. There are some good articles linked, like this post from Commentary magazine by Scott Atlas, entitled “The Worst Study Ever?”. Atlas is the same guy who listed out how the US health care system compares to others, which I blogged about before.

You can check out Matt’s blog “The Conscience of a Young Conservative“. Not sure how scalable that blog name is. Because of the “young” part, not because of the conscience or conservative part.

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Thomas Sowell on health care: thinking beyond stage one

Young Thomas Sowell

Economist Thomas Sowell explains what socialized medicine means for all parties – and what evidence is ignored.

Excerpt:

The same preference for talking points, and the same lack of interest in digging into the facts about realities, prevails today in discussions of whether to have a government-controlled medical system.

Since there are various countries, such as Canada and Britain, that have the kind of government-controlled medical systems that some Americans advocate, you might think that there would be great interest in the quality of medical care in these countries.

The data are readily available as to how many weeks or months people have to wait to see a primary-care physician in such countries, and how many additional weeks or months they have to wait after they are referred to a surgeon or other specialist. There are data on how often their governments allow patients to receive the latest pharmaceutical drugs, as compared with how often Americans use such advanced medications.

But supporters of government medical care show virtually no interest in such realities. Their big talking point is that the life expectancy in the United States is not as long as in those other countries. End of discussion, as far as they are concerned.

They have no interest in the reality that medical care has much less effect on death rates from homicide, obesity, and narcotics addiction than it has on death rates from cancer or other conditions that doctors can do something about. Americans survive various cancers better than people anywhere else. Americans also get to see doctors much sooner for medical treatment in general.

Conservatives are the reality-based community.

Filed under: News, Cancer, Death Panels, Death Rates, Doctor, Health-care, Life Expectancy, Medical Care, Nationalized Health Care, Obamacare, Patient, Physician, Primary Care Physician, Socialized Medicine, Thomas Sowell, Tom Sowell, Wait Times, Waiting List

New study finds that gay men are twice as likely to report having cancer

From the Sydney Morning Herald.

Excerpt:

A large study in California released Monday found that cancer may be nearly twice as prevalent among gay men as among straight men.

The study relied on self-reported data from the California Health Interview survey, the largest state survey of its kind in the United States, and included more than 120,000 people over three years: 2001, 2003 and 2005.

A total of 3,690 men reported a cancer diagnosis as adults. Gay men were 1.9 times as likely as straight men to have been diagnosed with cancer, said the study published in the peer-reviewed journal Cancer.

There was no such difference witnessed among lesbian and straight women, but gay and bisexual females were twice as likely to say they were in fair or poor health after a cancer diagnosis compared to their heterosexual counterparts.

[...]The survey did not address how cancer survival rates may differ among those of varying sexual orientation, and may not reflect a true difference in the actual cancer rate because it relied on data from survivors only.

But researchers believe that higher anal cancer rates, caused by the sexually transmitted human papillomaviruses, as well as complications from human immunodeficiency virus, may be at least partly to blame.

“The greater cancer prevalence among gay men may be caused by a higher rate of anal cancer, as suggested by earlier studies that point to an excess risk of anal cancer,” said the study.

Researchers “did not have data available on the rate of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, which is higher among gay men, and may have contributed to the significant association of cancer prevalence and sexual orientation.”

HIV and AIDS have been linked to a series of cancers including Kaposi sarcoma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma as well as anal, lung, testicular cancer and Hodgkin lymphoma.

Comments to this post will be strictly filtered in accordance with the Obama administration’s chilling of free speech.

Filed under: News, AIDS, California Health Interview, Cancer, Costs, Disease, Gay, Gay Men, Health, Health-care, HIV, Homosexuality, HPV, Peer-Review, Publication, Research, Sickness, Study, Treatment

Which health care system is better? Canada or the United States?

Story from the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.

The article compares (pre-Obamacare) American health care to health care in other places like Canada, the UK and Europe.

The full article. I almost never cite the full article, but this is a must read. Men, pay close attention to the differences in prostate cancer treatment rates in a for-profit system versus a single-payer system, where bureaucrats decide who gets treatment.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH:

Here’s a Second Opinion

By Scott W. Atlas

Ten reasons why America’s health care system is in better condition than you might suppose. By Scott W. Atlas.

Medical care in the United States is derided as miserable compared to health care systems in the rest of the developed world. Economists, government officials, insurers, and academics beat the drum for a far larger government role in health care. Much of the public assumes that their arguments are sound because the calls for change are so ubiquitous and the topic so complex. Before we turn to government as the solution, however, we should consider some unheralded facts about America’s health care system.1. Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers.Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.2. Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians.Breast cancer mortality in Canada is 9 percent higher than in the United States, prostate cancer is 184 percent higher, and colon cancer among men is about 10 percent higher.3. Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries. Some 56 percent of Americans who could benefit from statin drugs, which reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease, are taking them. By comparison, of those patients who could benefit from these drugs, only 36 percent of the Dutch, 29 percent of the Swiss, 26 percent of Germans, 23 percent of Britons, and 17 percent of Italians receive them.

4. Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians. Take the proportion of the appropriate-age population groups who have received recommended tests for breast, cervical, prostate, and colon cancer:

• Nine out of ten middle-aged American women (89 percent) have had a mammogram, compared to fewer than three-fourths of Canadians (72 percent).
• Nearly all American women (96 percent) have had a Pap smear, compared to fewer than 90 percent of Canadians.
• More than half of American men (54 percent) have had a prostatespecific antigen (PSA) test, compared to fewer than one in six Canadians (16 percent).
• Nearly one-third of Americans (30 percent) have had a colonoscopy, compared with fewer than one in twenty Canadians (5 percent).

5. Lower-income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians. Twice as many American seniors with below-median incomes self-report “excellent” health (11.7 percent) compared to Canadian seniors (5.8 percent). Conversely, white, young Canadian adults with below-median incomes are 20 percent more likely than lower-income Americans to describe their health as “fair or poor.”

6. Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the United Kingdom. Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long—sometimes more than a year—to see a specialist, have elective surgery such as hip replacements, or get radiation treatment for cancer. All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada. In Britain, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.

7. People in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed. More than 70 percent of German, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and British adults say their health system needs either “fundamental change” or “complete rebuilding.”

8. Americans are more satisfied with the care they receive than Canadians. When asked about their own health care instead of the “health care system,” more than half of Americans (51.3 percent) are very satisfied with their health care services, compared with only 41.5 percent of Canadians; a lower proportion of Americans are dissatisfied (6.8 percent) than Canadians (8.5 percent).

9. Americans have better access to important new technologies such as medical imaging than do patients in Canada or Britain. An overwhelming majority of leading American physicians identify computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the most important medical innovations for improving patient care during the previous decade—even as economists and policy makers unfamiliar with actual medical practice decry these techniques as wasteful. The United States has thirty-four CT scanners per million Americans, compared to twelve in Canada and eight in Britain. The United States has almost twenty-seven MRI machines per million people compared to about six per million in Canada and Britain.

10. Americans are responsible for the vast majority of all health care innovations. The top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other developed country. Since the mid- 1970s, the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology has gone to U.S. residents more often than recipients from all other countries combined. In only five of the past thirty-four years did a scientist living in the United States not win or share in the prize. Most important recent medical innovations were developed in the United States.

Despite serious challenges, such as escalating costs and care for the uninsured, the U.S. health care system compares favorably to those in other developed countries.

This essay appeared on the website of the National Center for Policy Analysis on March 24, 2009. An earlier version was published in the Washington Times.Available from the Hoover Press is Power to the Patient: Selected Health Care Issues and Policy Solutions, edited by Scott W. Atlas. To order, call 800.935.2882 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

Scott W. Atlas is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of radiology and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical School.

Please forward this article to all of your friends! It’s important!

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Researchers link rise in some cancers to increased sexual activity

From USA Today. (H/T Ruth Blog)

Excerpt:

Although the link between HPV and these types of cancers is indisputable, the association with oral sex is strong but a little more speculative, experts say.

A 2007 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that younger people with head and neck cancers who tested positive for oral HPV infection were more likely to have had multiple vaginal and oral sex partners in their lifetime.

In the study, having six or more oral sex partners over a lifetime was associated with a 3.4 times higher risk for oropharyngeal cancer — cancers of the base of the tongue, back of the throat or tonsils. Having 26 or more vaginal-sex partners tripled the risk.

And the association increased as the number of partners — in either category — increased.

The researchers also reported that cancers of the tonsil and base of the tongue have been increasing every year since 1973, and wrote that “widespread oral sex practices among adolescents may be a contributing factor in this increase.”

The researchers concluded that in their study, oral sex was “strongly associated” with oropharyngeal cancer, but noted that they could not “rule out transmission through direct mouth-to-mouth contact” such as French kissing.

In 90% of cases of HPV infection in the body, the immune system clears HPV naturally within two years, according to federal health agencies, but in some cases, certain types of HPV can lead to cervical cancer or less common malignancies, such as oropharyngeal cancer. A 2010 Swedish study, in fact, suggested that the rise in oropharyngeal squamous cell cancer in a number of countries “is caused by a slow epidemic of HPV infection-induced (cancers).”

HPV tends to be site specific, explained Dr. Amesh A. Adalja, an adjunct instructor in the division of infectious diseases at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. In other words, it tends to stay wherever it first enters the body, be it the vagina (which in some cases could lead to cervical cancer), or the mouth and throat.

Now here is the scary part:

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that, in 2002, some 90% of males and 88% of females aged 25 to 44 reported ever having oral sex with a partner of the opposite sex.

Comparable figures from 1992 showed that about three-quarters of men aged 20 to 39 and closer to 70% of women aged 18 to 59 having ever given or received oral sex.

And don’t forget that breast cancer has been linked to having abortions by several independent studies.

Filed under: News, Breast Cancer, Cancer, Choice, Feminism, Feminist, HPV, HPV Infection, Oral HPV Infection, Oral Sex, Oropharyngeal Cancer, Premarital Sex, Pro-Choice, Research, Science, Sex, Sex Education, STD, Tongue Cancer, Tonsil Cancer, Women