[quote=sdrealtor]One of my best friends is a physician who lives in Thailand and travels around the world training other doctors as the medical director for the Clinton Foundation. I think he would take umbrage to claims the quality of care in other countries is close to what we have here.[/quote]
The facts don’t bear out what your doctor friend claims to believe:
Seven years ago, the World Health Organization made the first major effort to rank the health systems of 191 nations. France and Italy took the top two spots; the United States was a dismal 37th. More recently, the highly regarded Commonwealth Fund has pioneered in comparing the United States with other advanced nations through surveys of patients and doctors and analysis of other data. Its latest report, issued in May, ranked the United States last or next-to-last compared with five other nations — Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom — on most measures of performance, including quality of care and access to it. Other comparative studies also put the United States in a relatively bad light.
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And from our own NIH (note: they didn’t even include Germany, Austria, Sweden, France, etc., who all have very high levels of quality healthcare):
POPULATION STUDIED: The quality indicators were compared at the national level in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: The results show that none of the five countries consistently scores the best or worst on all of the indicators. In addition, each country has either the best or the worst score on at least one indicator. In other words, no country scores consistently the best or worst overall, and each country has at least one area of care where it could potentially learn from international experience. Each country also has an area where it could potentially teach others. While the United States often performs relatively well for this set of indicators, it is difficult to conclude that the U.S. is getting good value for its medical care dollar from these data. CONCLUSIONS: Previous U.S. research has shown that Americans receive, on average, 55% of the gold standard of experts recommended medical care. International comparisons provide a complementary, more realistic, set of benchmarks in addition to the gold standard. The comparisons on this set of quality indicators show that each country performs well in some areas and poorly in others compared to other countries. None of the countries approaches the gold standard.
I also know people who have travelled to Europe or Canada for treatment because the U.S. hadn’t approved certain types of medicines or technologies that would compete with some of our mega-corporations here. These treatments are available in every other developed nation (for “free,” in many cases), and have a proven track record and fewer negative side effects, but can’t be had here.
One example is the “Cold Cap” treatment (designed and manufactured and used in Europe for years now) that can prevent hair loss for chemo patients. It’s been used in Europe for years now (for free, in most cases!), and nurses there help their patients with them — the process is very burdensome and heavy (literally), and here, women who are going through chemo are dragging around their own 100-200 lbs. of ice and caps to each chemo appt, and have to hire people to help them with the process throughout the chemo sessions. In Europe, the chemo centers have the caps and freezers right there in the rooms, and nurses help the patients with the caps. They’ve been used in France for about 15 years, IIRC, and are only now being “tested” in the U.S. -CAR
…….
The trial is limited to women with early-stage breast cancer who require chemotherapy, but the scalp-chilling technique has been used successfully for other kinds of cancer and in men who don’t want to lose their hair, advocates say.
Rugo, of UCSF, agreed to participate in the new trial in part because she’s been supervising scalp-freezing techniques to stop hair loss for three years, ever since a patient proud of her long, blond curly hair simply refused to let it go.
Instead, the patient convinced Rugo to let her try the Penguin Cold Cap, a British-made product used widely in Europe and now making inroads with cancer patients in the U.S.
The strap-on hats are filled with gel cooled to -30 Celsius that must be kept cold in special freezers or with dry ice, according to the company’s website. Patients must change the caps every 20 to 30 minutes before, during and after chemotherapy treatments, sometimes using as many as 15 caps per session to maintain proper scalp temperature.
According to a 1997 study in the European Journal of Cancer, the Cold Cap worked for 87% of patients. Another study published in the Annals of Oncology looked at several different methods of hair retention and found scalp cooling to be effective.
There are many, many examples of things like this — proven, safe treatments that are often better than what we have here, but cannot access due to the bureaucracy that is set up to protect our safety, but also set up to protect the profits of our corporations.
