It was six month check up time for me last week. There I was sitting (For all the ladies out there, I was shirtless. You’re welcome for the mental image.) in my cardiologists office when the door opens up, my doctor enters the room and the first words out of her mouth are: “Mr. Hobson… have you written your congressman yet?”
She was referring to writing with the express purpose of communicating disapproval of this debacle that is the Obama administration’s health care reform proposal. After a lengthy (about 10 minute) discussing with her about why she was not in favor or this particular health care reform she put things into perspective for me. According to her, there is need of some form of reform in the US health care system, but not total reform. She claims that 80% of the system is working and 20% is broken and that the proposed reform only attacks the working 80% and does virtually nothing to mend the broken 20%. She also added a little zinger as I was leaving the office. She told me that anyone who isn’t worried about this proposed reform either hasn’t been paying attention or doesn’t really understand it. I would agree with her.
As a cancer survivor I will most likely spend more time in a doctor’s office, for checks up and such, than any other person per year, so this is an issue that I am passionate about. Doing a little research this weekend I came across an article from a very respectable and credible source (Standford University, perhaps you’ve heard of them?) that takes a second look at the health care system in America as compared to countries who have socialized health care and asks, “Is it really that bad?”. You should head over to the Hoover Institution website and read the article for yourself, but I’ve collected a list of bullet points that should make you think and posted them here:
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.
Obama’s health care reform will take this away. Read the points. Think about it. And don’t just take my word for it. Do some research. Turn off the Ken and Barbi dolls that host the even news, get connected on the net with credible sources and look at the data for yourself. Obama is taking this nation down a road that it will be very sorry it went down, unless we act. Write and call your representatives and tell them that this reform is not needed, and not wanted.
August 4, 2009
Up To The Minute