World Health Organization deceives world regarding healthcare!

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Ruined

CAGiversary!
lol. US ranks low in terms of "healthcare" because they have lower average lifespan according to the W.H.O. However, W.H.O. purposely did not exclude death by fatalities caused by issues unrelated to healthcare such as death during war and fatal car crashes when calculating average lifespan
http://www.patientpowernow.org/2008/06/06/united-states-health-care-ranking-who/
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/08/why_the_us_ranks_low_on_whos_h.html

Apparently with those factored in, US ranks near the top. France is high on the list, not surprising considering they have no credible military.

Also, quality of healthcare according to the W.H.O. is based on how "fairly" healthcare is "distributed," instead of what standards the healthcare meets. So if you meet everyone's needs poorly, you are doing a better job than if you meet most people's needs well according to the W.H.O.


While we're at it:
http://www.john-goodman-blog.com/were-number-one-again/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/new...-soar-due-to-European-laws-surgeons-warn.html

While US healthcare is far from perfect, it looks like its actually pretty darn good. And I must say I won't be trusting anything the World Health Organization puts out going forward!
 
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Why would you count fatalities caused by issues unrelated to healthcare when trying gauge quality of.....healthcare?

Our on-site accident rate is really high, but if we factor in the accident rate of the employees after they leave work, its really good!

Distribution does matter. We could treat one guy named Bob really, really well and pull some fantastic numbers.
 
[quote name='Dr Mario Kart']Why would you count fatalities caused by issues unrelated to healthcare when trying gauge quality of.....healthcare?

Our on-site accident rate is really high, but if we factor in the accident rate of the employees after they leave work, its really good![/quote]

Exactly, perhaps I was unclear in my wording... Apparently you didn't read the article - I edited my wording. W.H.O. did not differentiate between death due to health reason, death on the battlefield, or instantaneous death via car crash. If you take out car fatalities and war-related death, guess who goes from #37 to top 3? Yep, USA. We just happen to go to war and also drive a lot compared to other countries, which is why we score so low on the W.H.O.'s scale.

Distribution does matter. We could treat one guy named Bob really, really well and pull some fantastic numbers.
Click to expand...

Right, but if all you count is distribution to determine quality (and this is what they focused on in addition to above skewed average lifespan), technically you can hand only a bandaid to each employee as their healthcare and claim 100% quality. When you'd really be doing jack shit for all of your employees. You need to take both into account or your "healthcare qualty" statistic is meaningless.

This is why the World Healthcare Organization's numbers are plain bullshit, and it is amazing how many times they have been quoted by so many sources!
 
[quote name='Dr Mario Kart']I'd say theres no justification for being far outside the bottom if half the country's bankruptcies are related to medical bills.[/QUOTE]

But we aren't outside the bottom. We are near the top if not at the top. Unless you want to count getting blown up by a roadside bomb in Iraq a "healthcare issue" as the World Health Organization does.

Also, do you actually know how our government healthcare system works? If you don't have a lot of money and you are not working & w/o insurance it is to your advantage to pile up medical bills because after you are thousands and thousands in debt, you can apply for Medically Needy Medicaid, which will retroactively pay your bills and then on top of that give you free healthcare for 6 months if you are approved; your local govt agency actually will give you an exact personalized dollar amount you need to hit in unpaid bills believe it or not based on your income and other factors. Then when your coverage eventually expires, you simply fail to pay your bills on purpose again until you reach your magic spend number, and you can apply for Medicaid again. Rinse and repeat. There are social workers who work for the government and local community centers that can help you with this up and down debt cycle without you having to pay a dime. If for some reason your Medicaid claim gets rejected the umpteenth time you did this, however, I could see how you could end up having to claim bankruptcy... The current government free healthcare system encourages irresponsibility.

But, this is a seperate argument that should not detract from how horribly skewed the WHO's numbers are by counting non-healthcare related deaths as healthcare-related deaths (as you even argued before you realized you were agreeing with me), and then on top of that only assessing quantity of service without assessing quality. What a joke.
 
I'll definitely sign up for quantity over quality. I say WHO cant be trusted if their numbers can produce something as high as #3.

You also just described how we cant possibly be very high.
 
Well, here is the thing. If it is agreed that current government healthcare programs like Medicaid (and heck welfare too) are fucked up and often encourage irresponsibility, why the heck would we want to give the government more control and power in the healthcare system? Most likely they would just screw it up even worse than it is!

The WHO I started with thread about is apparently a very left-leaning organization that wants things like fully government controlled healthcare. I just brought it up to demonstrate that our ranking in that assessment is a fix, and that though our healthcare system has flaws we actually ahead of most other industrialized nations. WHO was able to drop us down the list due to our preference to drive (resulting in more fatal car crashes) and our military standing up for the country (resulting in combat deaths) - two things a left-leaning organization also would probably like to eradicate. Unsuprisingly, that catapulted complacent countries like France that have no credible military and a hardcore leftist's wet dream of a government setup straight to the top of the healthcare list.

In summary, don't be brainwashed.
 
Wait, you mean an organization used facts to make up a lie? No, that can't be possible. I refuse to believe it, therefore, the lie must be a lie, making it truth. The USA sucks, dude, everybody knows that. Stop twisting around the facts to come up with such an obviously false conclusion. You should be ashamed.
 
[quote name='Ruined']If it is agreed that current government healthcare programs like Medicaid (and heck welfare too) are fucked up and often encourage irresponsibility, why the heck would we want to give the government more control and power in the healthcare system? Most likely they would just screw it up even worse than it is![/QUOTE]

But it's not something we agree on, and it's not something you demonstrate - it's something you merely assume by virtue of what you want to believe to be true.

As for the WHO, that's just lazy. If you think of this in terms of them wanting to single out the US system and malign it, they could have easily done a per-capita cost comparison relative to life expectancy.
 
[quote name='Ruined']Well, here is the thing. If it is agreed that current government healthcare programs like Medicaid (and heck welfare too) are fucked up and often encourage irresponsibility, why the heck would we want to give the government more control and power in the healthcare system? Most likely they would just screw it up even worse than it is![/QUOTE]
I think it would be difficult for patients, doctors, hospitals, hell anyone to hate anything more than the HMOs that currently run the system. I appreciate the small government angle, but private industry has been doing it for awhile and no one seems to like it. I don't think anyone believes the government will make health care a panacea, but most people would be quite happy with "less" bad.
 
The care you get at many hospitals in the US is quite good. Even County and VA hospitals give you good care because they are often staffed by academic personnel and residents who practice good evidence based medicine and are often committed to serving the community (that is except for me :D, who diagnoses everyone as malingering vs. factitious disorder vs. somatization disorder and refers them to the hospital across town...)

Quantifying the quality of care is something that's difficult to do. We often look at Value = Quality/Cost. However, quality measures are more nebulous... overall mortality has lots of confounding factors. There are many other parameters that you can measure, but non of them are perfect or thoroughly studied.

Access to healthcare != quality. Most young people don't really ever need to see a doctor, except for emergencies (I've been to a doctor maybe 2 times since high school... mainly to get forms signed for school/employment). Most health problems down the road are self-induced or just come about as one's body deteriorates in the geriatric years. The biggest and most cost effective interventions we can have would be to focus on preventative health care education:

* Diabetes: almost always preventable and curable in its early stages through good habits (save for autoimmune type 1 DM). All it takes is exercise and a good diet... forget the meds. Many admissions to the hospital stem from this: you lose feeling in your feet, so you develop nasty ulcers that get infected, your arteries a jacked up so your blood flow sucks, infections spread to your bone, and then we have to chop your feet off. In the process the vesels in your eyes and kidneys are also messed up, so these organs failed to... and did I mention that your heart disease risk skyrockets?

* Smoking: lung cancer, heart disease, stroke, COPD/emphysema... oh my. If you come in to my ER short of breath because your lungs are totally jacked, I'll give you some prednisone, albuterol, atrovent, perhaps some antibiotics, set you up with home oxygen and then tell you that you should have quit smoking 20 years age... seriously, don't do this!!!

* Hypertension: Studies have shown that relaxation, exercise, seight loss, stress reduction, and dietary measures can reduce this by 20-30%. Then you reduce your risk of stroke, heart disease, etc.

* Risky behaviours: traumas... enough said... also, if you have bad COPD on oxygen, please don't smoke... O2 is highly flammable and you'll soom be in our burn unit.

* Risky behaviours (sexual): You never really appreciate your immune system until you don't have it anymore... ask people with AIDS... from any intellectual standpoint, they are fascinating because they tend to get the most random/strange infections (stuff that normal people's immune systems would easily kill)... in either case, if you work in a hospital that's close to a large gay community (high HIV rates and drug use), you get to see a lot of these. So, please don't practice unsafe sex, don't do IV drugs, lay off the poppers, don't huff ethyl chloride, etc...

*Alcohol: The stuff fries your brain after a while, causes tons of social problems, and can lead to life-threatening intoxication and withdrawal symptoms... moderation please.

The issues above represent more than 1/2 of our admissions (and probably 90% of those younger than 60... the rest are either old people or very unfortunate people.
 
And there you have it. We could save 50% of medical costs by eliminating individual behavior

When national healthcare is finally enacted we can finally mandate exercise, daily meditation, outlaw smoking, and maybe give some jail time for risky sexual behavior. If the common good health benefit argument doesn't fly then at least the common cost benefit argument can become law of the land.
 
I would just like to point out that my province has had universal healthcare since... 1946? And yes, as a matter of fact, we can still have sex with multiple partners while watching television, smoking, and blaspheming against the Buddha (or whatever the opposite of meditation is).

Apparently, we lucked out and got very lazy oppressive communist overlords.
 
[quote name='The Crotch']I bet Mexican liposuction sucks.[/quote]

So you're saying it works exactly as it should?
moz-screenshot.jpg
 
Okay, I'll reissue my thesis. When national healthcare becomes law, we can tax the shit out of cigarettes and mcDonalds so we can pay for all the heath problems they create. We'll call them GHC (Government Health Contribution) and BMT (Behavioral Modification Tax). Then we'll raise the income taxes on the rich again to pay for all the excess and print another trillion dollars to pay for my 90 year-old granny's new kidney and heart transplants.
 
[quote name='bmulligan']Then we'll raise the income taxes on the rich again to pay for all the excess...[/quote]
Again, I should point out that we spend less per-capita and as a percent of our GDP than you do on healthcare. I suppose that's just us mooching offa you again, same as England, Sweden, Japan, Germany, France, and Australia.

...

We do love to tax the mothafuckin' shit out of our cigarettes, though.
 
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