Commonwealth comes to it's usually conclusion...
U.S. scores dead last again in healthcare study
Wed Jun 23, 2010
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Americans spend twice as much as residents of other developed countries on healthcare, but get lower quality, less efficiency and have the least equitable system, according to a report released on Wednesday.
How could the media allow the bogus, made to order, results of the Commonwealth Funds survey of health systems remain unexamined? Laziness, bias and just too busy? Here is the gist of the study:
The report looks at five measures of healthcare -- quality, efficiency, access to care, equity and the ability to lead long, healthy, productive lives. Britain, whose nationalized healthcare system was widely derided by opponents of U.S. healthcare reform, ranks first in quality while the Netherlands ranked first overall on all scores, the Commonwealth team found.
U.S. patients with chronic conditions were the most likely to say they gotten the wrong drug or had to wait to learn of abnormal test results.
"The findings demonstrate the need to quickly implement provisions in the new health reform law," the report reads.
Critics of reports that show Europeans or Australians are healthier than Americans point to the U.S. lifestyle as a bigger factor than healthcare. Americans have higher rates of obesity than other developed countries, for instance.
"On the other hand, the other countries have higher rates of smoking," Davis countered. And Germany, for instance, has a much older population more prone to chronic disease.
Some thoughts:
It is easy in any health system to find people who are happy with their health care, in Europe particularly. That permits Commonwealth from avoiding the real analytical work or confronting the reality that Britain’s NHS has severe structural problems or, that despite the market-based reforms Netherlands has instituted (oops, Commonwealth ignores that) significant health disparities between urban and rural, rich and poor, immigrants and citizens persist. The British medical journals and media are awash with studies showing that disparities are widening. Sir Michael Rawlins of NICE told me as much last year. Somehow, somewhere Commonwealth Foundation the 200 people in Britain who think the NHS is great. Maybe Karen Davis just interview Donald Berwick 200 times.
Of course the findings lead to the conclusion that Obamacare should be adopted. This is the same organization that claimed comparative effectiveness research based on the Dartmouth Atlas would save over a trillion dollars between 2010-2020. It’s easy if you use survey data instead of carefully designed studies that rely on data sets, including biomarkers, that permit reliable international comparisons over a period of time. Such as five year survival rates for various forms of cancer by stage, treatment for asthma, access to psychiatric care (mental illness is the fastest growing disease), ability for people over 65 to live without disabilities, etc. access to new treatments. If you don’t do serious research and the media just laps up your claims and findings uncritically you can say anything you want.
