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France #1 for health care. Why aren't we?

Why aren't we? Because the methodology appears to put a significant emphasis on the financials. It does not mean that we are low in quality of care, just that we are more expensive and the WHO favors cheap over access to cutting edge treatment. If you want to have brain surgery or a heart transplant in Malta, go ahead. I will stick with the US hospitals.
 

All of those countries also have very standards of care, the only reason the U.S. has more cutting edge medicine because of the most of it researched and developed there due to the fact you have a far larger population. There is also the issue of you may have a new cutting edge treatment, it's just no one can afford to get it.
 

I can. Still doesn't change that the US ranks low because people actually have to pay for their medical care. We not only have a much larger population, we also have much larger territory to cover with our medical care as most of the countries are a fraction of the size of the US in square feet.
 
If anyone in my family needs a serious operation, I'm having it done right here in the United States where we have the best doctors and medical facilities in the world.

I would encourage the Hate America types to do the rest of us a favor and go to France for all of their medical needs.
 
Because France has universal healthcare, not the ****ty system the USA had before obamacare, and not obamacare.
 

It's access quality for care means nothing if no one can actually get the treatment or have to spend the rest of their lives paying medical lives to get it. What do you think Canada is? You have a much larger population and a lot more universities studying medical fields than any other country, of course the medical breakthroughs are where the labs and facilities to do so are going to be.
 

The WHO is flawed and not really a good metric for analysis of healthcare systems. I would challenge that France is number 1 in healthcare. It it is simply too subjective and the study too broad.

It's not so much that people have to 'pay' for their healthcare that causes your system to rate poorly, rather the gaps and holes that exist. America has some of the best medical care in the world. Especially it's emergency department is regarded as top notch. One of colleagues is working on a paper discussing the outcome of a Boston Bombingesq even had it happened here. In terms of feet on the ground, medical care and equipment, yes it ranks highly. However when you look at it in in synergy, the costs of the system*, poor access, inefficiency and the lack of a clear framework, overall outcomes, USA isn't doing so good. The penulitmaite question, onemthat keeps me up many a night, is how do we design a system that has a high quality of care, efficient, covers 100% of the population and is politically possible?

I always get stuck on the political possible.

Edit: The study and not the WHO in general.
 
Rainman05 said:
Because France has universal healthcare, not the ****ty system the USA had before obamacare, and not obamacare.
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[/thread].....
 

But, the actual quality of the average medical professional and the medical technology is superior. Yes?

Now, if we could come to a compromise on healthcare subsidies--let me say it again, healthcare subsidies--we could be ranked #1 in the world, too.
 
Many Americans think money is more important than health.
 
sbrettt said:
This link is a detailed explanation of how the World Health Organization ranks health care
http://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper30.pdf
Read if you really want to know where we are. You won't like it.
Click to expand...
Sounds about right. I wouldn't expect any significant technological variance between the EU and the US. What I would expect is financial prioritisation to reflect their respective approaches. Socialised medicine is a concept anathema to most Americans, it seems. You'd have to expect that access and quality would suffer on account of that, for those less solvent demographics in society.
 

The average quality of care is not any higher it is just that most of the research and innovation takes place int he U.S. so it gets implemented there first but quickly spreads to other countries.
 
0bserver92 said:
The average quality of care is not any higher it is just that most of the research and innovation takes place int he U.S. so it gets implemented there first but quickly spreads to other countries.
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You just said that medical technology in America is superior to the rest of the world.
 
Not if it's use is restricted to those who can afford it.
 
The method they use is probably as good (or bad) as any other method of comparing apples and oranges, but look at the results of their calculations (Table 1, page 18).

Isn't it... interesting that rich countries with universal health care like Denmark and New Zealand are ranking at about the same level as USA?

While Colombia and Morocco - substantially higher? (Colombia beats out Canada, Germany, Sweden...wow).

Rather puzzling, no?

And: Estonia is lower than Nicaragua or Senegal?! Pure, unadulterated rubbish.

I know Estonia pretty well, visited my friends there many times, and had to deal with some health issues while there. It wasn't Mayo or Massachusetts General, but nothing was really lacking or inadequate.

This is more in line with my experience, and with what my friends are telling me:
Healthcare in Estonia is better than Britain's NHS, says damning report | Mail Online
 
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The profit motive and not giving a damn about our fellow man. Same as every other problem.
 
apdst said:
You just said that medical technology in America is superior to the rest of the world.
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Yes it is when is invented but then only researchers have access to it then it spreads to the rest of the world. For example a new cancer treatment is created in an American University. Sure for those have limited access to it i.e. thr rich and test subjects it has better quality of care but after that it will spread to doctors and universities in other countries probably quickly depending on how fast most of these can pass drug standards. The other thing that let's the U.S. advance ahead of most others is that it's drug standards are less strict than other nations. If you want to know why the U.S. innovates in the medical field faster than most other countries if you have a large pool of people to choose form as you have far more universities and you also have the industry for it, no other country really has a large medical industry.
 
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0bserver92 said:
It's access quality for care means nothing if no one can actually get the treatment or have to spend the rest of their lives paying medical lives to get it. What do you think Canada is?
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I think that Canada is the place where the Supreme Court had to strike down the law criminalizing private medicine because the waiting lists for healthcare were getting atrocious. What was it they said? Oh yeah.

Access to a waiting list is not access to healthcare.

You have a much larger population and a lot more universities studying medical fields than any other country, of course the medical breakthroughs are where the labs and facilities to do so are going to be.
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That is part of it. Our universities also study medicine more because they are paid to do so in connection with our medical industry, which does better because we allow it to profit off of its' research. The rest of the world (especially our neighbors to the North), choke off their own medical research industries by attempting to reduce the profit they can see, and freeload instead off of US investments. Americans pay more for drugs so that Canadians can pay less.
 

This works both ways as I don't recall America being the only country that makes medical breakthroughs. Indeed it all became laughable when some US Commentators during a 2009 US debate about Obamacare suggested that Senator Kennedy would have died far earlier if he had been treated by the British NHS. The truth being that British Scientists Peter Manfield and Godfrey Hounsfield were instrumental in the development of the MRI Machines and CT Scanners used to diagnose such Brain Cancers and were awarded Noble Prizes for their efforts. Whilst the Cancer Drug Senator Kennedy was being treated with Temozolomide (Temodal™) was developed by Aston University in the UK.

Peter Mansfield - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Godfrey Hounsfield - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Temozolomide - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://www.unison.org.uk/file/B4709.pdf

The Royal Marsden (London) and its academic partner, The Institute of Cancer Research (UK), have discovered or developed more new anti-cancer drugs than the National Cancer Institute in the USA.

World-leading cancer expertise at The Royal Marsden
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The UK has a significant pharmaceutical industry with one in five of the world's biggest-selling prescription drugs being developed in the UK and home grown companies such as GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca as well as Foreign pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, Novartis, Hoffmann–La Roche and Eisai all having a major presence in the UK . The UK also has a lot of research facilities across the country with Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and London being world famous centres for medical science.

One of the largest current developments in terms of Research Facilities is the Francis Crick Institute which is currently under development in London and scheduled to open in 2015 is the £650 million ($1 Billion) Francis Crick Institute. Named after Francis Crick who with James D. Watson and Maurice Wilkins was noted for being a co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule at the University of Cambridge in 1953 for which they were jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine - "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material'.

Home | The Francis Crick Institute

Francis Crick Institute - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Britain is also home to a number of large medical charities and significant trust funds such as the Wellcome Trust.

Wellcome Trust - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 
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sbrettt said:
This link is a detailed explanation of how the World Health Organization ranks health care
http://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper30.pdf
Read if you really want to know where we are. You won't like it.
Click to expand...

Of course, but to admit that name brand american healthcare is not the best would completely shatter the illusion that the more you pay the better quality you get. If one actually thinks about the american system you have rto be rich to get the best healthcare, and middle class and poor people are simply not part of the one percent that can afford the high end. Meanwhile the American healthcare system tells them that because the name brand is slapped on their healthcare that they get the same quality that the rich get. It is pretty much the same thing as slapping a lexus logo on a toyota corolla and telling people they got a luxury car.

You will never get the right wing to actually admit that there is a problem. They are too caught up in the philosophy that spending lots of money makes something better. They point at Donald trump and declare they can get the best health care because he can get the best healthcare. You are showing them that their healthcare actually sucks and that they have been completely duped by the rich. They will never admit to that. The only thing you can do with that sort of insanity and stupidity is to wait for it to die off and to try and keep it from infecting the next generation.
 
Europe isn't behind in medical technology. In many areas, they are ahead.

Drugs are made and developed by EU pharma companies, but what drives their profits is selling to the US market. Functionally, the US consumer is subsidizing all the pharma R and D in the world.

What ends up happening is that the top tier of medical quality in the US is at least as good as the best in the world, but most of the US population is locked out of it.
 
sbrettt said:
This link is a detailed explanation of how the World Health Organization ranks health care
http://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper30.pdf
Read if you really want to know where we are. You won't like it.
Click to expand...
The us has the highest rate of cancer survival in the world I think we are fine in health care what your talking about is health insurance
 
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