Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

U.S. health is lousy compared with peer nations, report says

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 110 posts

Re: U.S. health is lousy compared with peer nations, report says

#71

Post by fatbird »

Irregardless wrote: post #21

And yet people from around the world fly here every day to have critical surgeries performed by the world's top doctors in state of the art facilities. News Flash: The U.S. isn't a welfare state. To benefit from everything this country has to offer, you need to pay for it. Yes, it would be better if that didn't apply to healthcare, but there needs to be some method of exclusion when demand is high and supply is low.…

My brother in Columbus, Ohio, with a health plan for a director level position in a Fortune 1000 company, got a referral to a neurologist for a pinched nerve. Took six months to actually get inside a neurologist's office. This, in a health care market of 1.5 million people.

What's that about wait times in nationalized healthcare countries again? I'm sure he'd have been much more quickly served in Vancouver or Toronto or Manchester.

Re: U.S. health is lousy compared with peer nations, report says

#72

Post by graeme »

potatolicious wrote: post #51
Irregardless wrote: post #21

And yet people from around the world fly here every day to have critical surgeries performed by the world's top doctors in state of the art facilities. News Flash: The U.S. isn't a welfare state. To benefit from everything this country has to offer, you need to pay for it. Yes, it would be better if that didn't apply to healthcare, but there needs to be some method of exclusion when demand is high and supply is low.…

> "And yet people from around the world fly here every day to have critical surgeries performed by the world's top doctors in state of the art facilities." Citation sorely needed. This claim is regularly trot around, but nobody has been able to point to data that would suggest that this is anything but extreme outlier behavior. As a Canadian who lives in the US it's often shocking how different the perception of the…

Also a Canadian, just want to confirm this. I can see a doctor instantly, for free, at any one of the clinics near my house. If I need to see a specialist, the referral usually happens within a few days or a week for anything urgent. Ditto for bloodwork, you just take the referral to a hospital.

There are some exceptions, but generally things work well.

Re: U.S. health is lousy compared with peer nations, report says

#73

Post by tsotha »

>The study listed nine health areas in which Americans came in below average: infant mortality and low birth weight, injuries and homicides, adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, HIV and AIDS, drug-related deaths, obesity and diabetes, heart disease, chronic lung disease and disability.

I hope people don't think this is some condemnation of the US health care system. No matter how good your health care system is you're not going to be able to correct for serious lifestyle problems.

Re: U.S. health is lousy compared with peer nations, report says

#74

Post by avalind »

tptacek wrote: post #62
avalind wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This report[1] claims that the difference in reporting child mortality isn't the chief cause of the difference in infant mortality between the U.S and similarly developed countries. Instead the claim that most of this difference is due to the high percentage of pre-term births in the US compared to other developed countries. [1] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db23.pdf

Isn't a preterm baby which fails to survive exactly the kind of event that wouldn't be documented as an infant mortality at all in a less rigorous country?

Yes. But I'm not sure I follow here, both Sweden and the US use the same criteria to report a live birth (All live births are reported) and seem to use the same definition of Infant mortality rate, (Death before first birthday). I fail to see how reporting differences explain the difference in infant mortality between the two countries. Of course, compared to countries that use extra conditions for live births (weight limits etc.) the US would get a higher rate of infant mortality due to having more laxed conditions for what constitutes a live birth.

Re: U.S. health is lousy compared with peer nations, report says

#75

Post by tptacek »

avalind wrote: post #74
tptacek wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't a preterm baby which fails to survive exactly the kind of event that wouldn't be documented as an infant mortality at all in a less rigorous country?

Yes. But I'm not sure I follow here, both Sweden and the US use the same criteria to report a live birth (All live births are reported) and seem to use the same definition of Infant mortality rate, (Death before first birthday). I fail to see how reporting differences explain the difference in infant mortality between the two countries. Of course, compared to countries that use extra conditions for live births (weigh…

It would be shocking if the US had infant mortality rates that were apples-apples close to Sweden. Sweden has just 9 million people, and they're very homogenous.

The lede on stories about US infant mortality isn't that Sweden outdoes us. It's things like "the US ranks alongside Qatar and Croatia". Those are the assertions I think we need to be more careful about.

Re: U.S. health is lousy compared with peer nations, report says

#76

Post by avalind »

tptacek wrote: post #75
avalind wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But I'm not sure I follow here, both Sweden and the US use the same criteria to report a live birth (All live births are reported) and seem to use the same definition of Infant mortality rate, (Death before first birthday). I fail to see how reporting differences explain the difference in infant mortality between the two countries. Of course, compared to countries that use extra conditions for live births (weigh…

It would be shocking if the US had infant mortality rates that were apples-apples close to Sweden. Sweden has just 9 million people, and they're very homogenous. The lede on stories about US infant mortality isn't that Sweden outdoes us. It's things like "the US ranks alongside Qatar and Croatia". Those are the assertions I think we need to be more careful about.

Totally Agree with you. I would think that a big reason as to why the U.S has the rankings it has is the heterogeneity of the US population.

Re: U.S. health is lousy compared with peer nations, report says

#77

Post by sjg007 »

tptacek wrote: post #43

Worth remembering some things here: * The US is thought by some economists to have an artificially high infant mortality because the US is more rigorous about reporting live births than other countries which might write up the same events as stillbirths. * Outcomes in the US for chronic serious illnesses are at or near the top of the rankings. * Life expectancy figures in the US are anchored down by suicides and, mor…

suicides, greatest country ever...

Re: U.S. health is lousy compared with peer nations, report says

#78

Post by yummyfajitas »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #20
127001brewer wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very interesting - can you provide a reference?

Check out The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson et al.

The spirit level claims that a variety of factors, one of which is inequality, are all correlated. It provides very little empirical evidence that inequality is the cause (apart from being on the x-axis).

Re: U.S. health is lousy compared with peer nations, report says

#79

Post by tokenadult »

w1ntermute wrote: post #27
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #3

The US is at or very near the worst among OECD countries in: infant mortality, child poverty, child health and safety, life expectancy at birth, healthy life expectancy, rate of obesity, disability-adjusted life years, doctors per 1000 people, deaths from treatable conditions, rate of mental health disorders, rate of drug abuse, rate of prescription drug use, incarceration rate, rate of assaults, rate of homicides, i…

Do you know if these things are demographically linked, like education is[0]? I haven't done any research, but my gut tells me they are. 0: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

You should learn not to rely on that link for your understanding of the world. It is crap.

Re: U.S. health is lousy compared with peer nations, report says

#80

Post by tptacek »

sjg007 wrote: post #77
tptacek wrote: post #43

Worth remembering some things here: * The US is thought by some economists to have an artificially high infant mortality because the US is more rigorous about reporting live births than other countries which might write up the same events as stillbirths. * Outcomes in the US for chronic serious illnesses are at or near the top of the rankings. * Life expectancy figures in the US are anchored down by suicides and, mor…

suicides, greatest country ever...

It does not help at all that we have overseas military commitments at a scale no other industrial country would match. The suicide rate for veterans is wildly higher than for civilians.
Post reply on HN