Bear with me here. This is my first ever Diary so it probably won't look as neat and pretty as what you are used to seeing.
The topic is an old one but I think the content will be new to most of you out there.
I am dying to have some one present me with some defensible reason why we shouldn't simply scrap our current health care system and go directly to a Nationalized System.
National Health Care in this country was killed by the AMA 58 years ago. If we haven't come up with a workable alternative in all that time I don't see that there is much chance of this happening any time soon.
A Million and Half Civilian Casualties in the US over the past five years
While we concentrated on the war on terror for the past five years, a million and a half Americans died in the US needlessly of inadequate but very expensive medical care.
While almost every American worker saw real paychecks shrink, and saw their benefits diminished while the cost of those benefits increased, and watched helplessly while their jobs were outsourced and their pensions were stolen, the American Medical Profession got richer and richer along with the people who made it all possible - the US Congress.
These are the facts
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death on the planet ( 15 million world wide deaths in 2003 ) and also the leading cause of death in every individual country in the world, including the US, where it killed just under a million Americans in the same year. Because of both its universality and its overarching significance, cardiovascular death rates should be an excellent tool to use to compare the performance of different countries' health care systems.
This link below, provided by the American Heart Association, will take you to a graph that shows the country by country death rates for cardiovascular disease using the most recently available data.
http://www.americanheart.org/...
From the graph at this link you will find that 18 industrialized nations have a better record for cardiovascular death rate than the US, and incidentally, all these countries have National Health Care Systems.
You can also easily find from other sources that none of these countries spend any where near as much per person on health care as does the United States.
The example I like best is to compare the US with Switzerland, a country that has similar demographics to the US, has similar citizen wealth, has identical ratios of men to women in the population ( 0.97 ), and uses the same ICD 10 codes to characterize cardiovascular disease as the US does.
In addition, Switzerland actually has an older population in terms of average age ( 39.77 to 36.27) and they have a higher percentage of their population in the high cardiovascular risk age group over 65 ( 15.4% to 12.4% ). *
They also spend far less ( 10.9% of GDP ) than we do ( 16% of GDP ) for their health care, which covers all their people ( not just 84% of them as happens to be the case in the US ). In US dollars the Swiss per person health care costs are $ 3,551 versus $ 6,624 for the US, an 86.5% disparity.
And yet despite all this, the US death rate ( 232.5 per 100,000 of population ) for cardiovascular disease is 72% higher than theirs ( 133.5 ), a difference which equates to just under 300,000 extra deaths per year in the US.
Think of it. We spend 86.5% more and we have 74 % more deaths !
The death rate difference between the two countries amounts to one avoidable death every other minute.
Every 3 1/2 days more people die needlessly of heart disease in the US ( 2844 ) than have died in the 3 1/2 years of the Iraqi War ( 2626 as of August 26, 2006 ) - and more in fact than were killed in the attack five years ago on the World Trade Center ( 2749 ).
In fact, since that attack, the total number of avoidable deaths has reached just under 1.5 million !
I recently wrote the AARP ( and the American Heart Association and the National Coalition on Health Care ) about this situation and urged them all to take the lead in demanding reform of the US Health Care System, and this is what I got in reply.
"So while major health care system reforms are needed, there are unfortunately no realistic congressional prospects in the short term for a complete overhaul of the health care system ".
To which I say well that is too f---ing bad, because we can make sure that there are no realistic congressional prospects for re-election unless monumentally ( not incrementally ) reforming the US Health Care System moves immediately to number one on the political agenda.
Just as a little incentive to get some comment going on this issue I would like to point out that not only does the US have the worst Health Care performance among the top industrialized nations of the world, the extra expense of our system over the best of the rest is a whopping 670 billion dollars a year. That is enough money to more than save Social Security in the bargain.
Think of it --- we have the worst health care system in the industrialized world for both cost and performance, and we are on the verge of losing much of our Social Security benefits, and if we fix the Health Care problem, we get Social Security fixed for free - and " there are no realistic congressional prospects for reform" ?????
Congress needs an attitude readjustment and KOS Bloggers are just the people to give it them.
There are easy ways to fix the problem but I'd love to hear from others before I throw my two cents in.
* Other interesting facts about Swiss Health in general is that their average life expectancy at birth is 80.39 years versus 77.71 for the US, and their infant mortality rate per thousand live births is 4.4 versus 6.5 for the US. Does anyone really think its just luck ?