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Permalink Like Dislike U.S. ranks 28th in life expectancy (lower than Chile and Greece) while it pays the MOST for health care
Meanwhile, Americans receive comparatively little actual care, despite sky-high prices driven by expensive tests and procedures.
They also spend more tax money on healthcare than most other countries, the study showed.
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mdovell says
Did you read the article or just the headline? The article was actually pretty complementary about this and it seems most of the patients actually liked it. Those that didn't had the option of going back to individual appointments.
There is NO shortage of doctors. The US has about as many doctors per capita as the rest of the first world. The problem is poor distribution. Since we are not a command based economy doctors obviously have the right to pursue whatever specialty they choose wherever the choose. The shortages are obviously going be taken care of by the free market. Or maybe not.
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I saw the "article" since it is one of the local tv shows in the Boston area.
Are you aware that this nullifies HIPPA?
The idea of a shortage or surplus isn't the right argument anyway. If you lower the amount of pay or make working conditions worse you are going to have fewer people entering any job.
It can be argued that there is more money to be made in specialization rather than general practice but the issue with that is costs get higher for patients when it is specialization. The same goes with other industries. In education teaching special ed pays more. In animal care pet care pays much more than farm animals.
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mdovell says
This doesn't nullify HIPPA minimum necessary standard at all.
The minimum necessary standard does not apply when the physician releases information: (a) directly to the patient, (b) pursuant to a patient's authorization, or (c) for disclosures that are required by law or are necessary to comply with the Privacy Rules.
Part b is obviously in effect if the patient is in the room and has agreed to discuss the information with other people present.
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Pacifica, CA
"Although that is certainly true they did not actually even say the word exercise or fitness until when?"
What does this mean?
"The government cannot demand that any business raise or lower their pay (outside of say minimum wage)."
The government can provide services for its citizens. That is a main function, as in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.
The administrative cost of Social Security, for example, is small, and very efficient. The profit motive motive is missing, as it should be in a public benefit.
There is nothing "competitive" about our health care system. It's about gouging the public to the max while terrifying them with death if they do not pay. In many people's cases, such as my own, it's true; without health care coverage I face a potential early death.
Ten years ago, my monthly health care premiums were $250. Now, they are $804, and I'm barely able to cover that. Many people are worse off than I, they go to the emergency room I suppose, or just die, who knows?
My health care plan rejected my application to go onto a high deductible plan, saying that if I did switch (which they wouldn't allow) they might boot me off entirely on Dec. 31, 2013, at which point I'd need to get a "government-approved" plan.
That's because industry lobbyists wrote the health care bill.
Medicare for all is the solution, get rid of all the bloodsuckers.
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monkframe says
If you can't pay you die.
Thats capitalism. It was that way in 1867 when Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital, but was slightly derailed by WWII, and is now back on track!
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elliemae's website
The group appointment thing works for medical nutritionists and a few other specialties but I doubt people are honest with their docs when sitting in a group of people.
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Fluoridated drinking water damages health substantially in the US. Fluoride is more toxic than arsenic and slightly less toxic than lead. (Distillation is the most cost-effective way to remove the fluoride)
Aspartame in soda beverages, when consumed, turns into toxic wood alcohol in the bloodstream.
The average American diet is comprised mostly of ultra-processed foods with less than 1/10 of their original nutritive value.
Add some cancer-causing Wi-Fi near the home, and over time you end up with something closely resembling population control.
It's a eugenicist's wet dream out there.
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C Boy says
I read this book last year that presents peer-reviewed, fact based information about links between animal-potein-based diets and cancer. Basically, the author describes how a few decades of scientific method suggest a link between the protein in cow's milk and cancer in lab rats.
http://www.amazon.com/China-Study-Comprehensive-Nutrition-Implications/dp/1932100385
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zzyzzx says
And what is the life expectancy in those countries?
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Nothing, people have been asking this question for decades and it's only getting better. Everything is cheaper. 40mpg cars for under 13k that will last over 200k miles on original engine, $5 cell phones, 600 plasma TVs that used to cost 60,000. Unemployment and real estate prices that are still cheaper than all other non third world countries as far as I know.
The problem is when you people look at the rich, and compare yourself to them, then feel you can't be happy with a shack and food on the table like your parents had it. There I'm at three posts. I can make my own thread now :)
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snyderkv says
I agree.
Malthusian Fabian socialism organized and backed by central bankers seeks to control population numbers by introducing population growth control mechanisms into society.
They have done this through untested GMO foods, which are now showing that they can destroy the ability to reproduce after ingestion over three generations in hamsters. Immune systems are also compromised.
Malthusian socialism has also resulted in fluoridation of 60% of America's our tap water. Fluoride is more toxic than arsenic and about as toxic as lead. This does directly destroy thinking capacity and lowers IQ.
We also have aspartame, MSG, fructose corn syrup, an international fast food industry, Wi-Fi which and cell phone radiation which causes cancer, and on and on and on.
So, we get to enjoy high tech and better medicine, while at the same time we are slowly culled by central bankers, in order to keep our numbers in line with their projections.
Sick fucks, indeed.
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GameOver says
Um yes actually I do measure standard of living by cheap goods like real estate, food and gadgets. What is your definition?
GameOver says
At least I'm smart enough to read forum rules and not call others dumb just because you disagree with their opinions. Unless I just called you dumb now for not being smart enough to read forum rules. Doh!
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Fine, but my response was directed towards peoples definition of standard of living. So you opened a new line of discussion that has no bearing on my former statements.
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Yes, the problem will be solved by having the government take it over and regulate it and pass some laws. Maybe jail some people.
Sure it will. Sure.
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snyderkv says
Real estate prices is not cheaper at all. And housing prices in US dropping for the 6th year in a row. See
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/story/2011-11-29/case-shiller-sept/51460490/1
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/09/home-prices-first-quarter-2011_n_859299.html
And thats because people in the US just don't have the money to buy homes and/or keep their existing homes, given their current prices. With their rapidly shrinking income, they can't qualify for home loans with big lies about their so-called "stated income" and/or maintain current mortgage payments. And as time goes by, unemployment benefits will run out, state and federal government budget deficits with explode, creating a vicious cycle of more layoffs (from public sector) followed by less consumer spending and the story of economic misery will go on. The only way out is down. And I won't even discuss about the rapidly increasing competition in high-tech fields, specially from countries like India and China, which will rapidly reduce high-paying tech jobs in US.
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Healthcare prices are an extreme ripoff. It's the doctors them selves that are gaming the system not the insurance companies. We need to reform the industry. Heavy politics gets played here and we end up with obamacare which will cost us more.
We have specialists in this industry making 1000s of dollars per hour? and healthy you...your paying for it.
As for as living 6 years longer by average like in japan...I want to see the study as how many of them are in assisted care for their last 10 years.
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I would love to see a break down of actual medical expenses across age groups and geographic locations.
My hunch is that age group wise most of the expenses go to the 55+ groups. While your first instinct would be to think that this normal and expected I strongly disagree. Expensive long term medical issues usually start much earlier. Early health monitoring could be a boon for life expectancy.
In the end it's mostly the young who can't afford (or are not willing to) to have health care and are not covered by Medicaid/Medicare. Fixing this problem of course is impossible in the current political climate. So health care costs will continue to rise until the cost bubble bursts.
I find it fascinating that something like dental health care still does increase in cost. Why does it not go down with more efficient technology and improved process? How much more value can you add to dental health care? We are not adding teeth to humans nor do we make false teeth out of diamonds.
The same thought should be applied to the medical field as a whole. I think this is where thinking about medical care in market terms is questionable. It has never worked for some reason. Anywhere.
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ttt says
I bet -9 months to 6 months has more expenses.
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Crack, Bacon, Bread, Cigs, Beer, Stress, Candy, Sodium, Cancer, Coronary Plaque, Oh you name it.
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The whole reason we industrialized is so we could have a lot of wealth without having to work very hard (physically) to get it.
Now that's killing us. WTF?
Maybe we should just be like the Amish.
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ttt says
So far, it's been the opposite. Services marketed as "preventive care" include a lot of diagnostic radiation that increases cancer risks. Getting yourself irradiated is a common way to spend more to die sooner.
ttt says
Dental costs in the USA have increased primarily because of the increasing role of insurance companies, which negotiate higher retail prices as part of their "in-network" discounts. The dentist doesn't get more, but the customer pays more; the difference goes to the insurance company. Related to that, many dentists do more unnecessary procedures if they are covered by insurance, e.g. "perio root scaling," an interesting reflection of the excessive billables on the medical side; the patients feel valued, like they're getting VIP treatment, when in fact they're often getting suckered. Also, materials costs (e.g., gold) have increased dramatically, and bruxism damage has become increasingly common due to stress, overtaking cavities as the #1 cause of dental work. Cash prices in other countries, e.g. Mexico, remain a fraction of American prices.
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curious2 says
Life expectancy has been decreasing? When did that start? I didn't get the memo.
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bob2356 asks
Average life expectancy has been increasing due to many factors: fewer people smoking, more clean water, more education, better occupational safety and health, seat belts and airbags, vaccines, etc. Radiation increases your risk of cancer and is thus generally bad for your health, except in limited circumstances where it may be the lesser of two evils.
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curious2 says
I've never had radiation except as a specific test to diagnose a specific problem.If you have a broken bone or a possible tumor then getting an xray or mri isn't "preventative care" in my mind. You need to know what's going on.
So what is this "preventative care" that randomly exposes you to radiation with no specific goal. I've never heard of "preventative care" radiation and neither does my wife who is a doctor. The only thing I've ever read about people paying for a full body MRI, but that's just silly and pretty rare. What percentage of the population gets radiation without looking for some actual problem? Do you have any research articles or is this anecdotal?
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bob2356 says
Here is one common and widely documented example:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/mammograms-role-as-savior-is-tested/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06sun1.html
We have already commented about C-T scans, yet you seem to keep forgetting them; here are more sources for you:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1818520,00.html
http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/QAA400702/Too-Many-CT-Scans.html
As you are married to a doctor, you can probably find more examples without needing me to do your homework for you. Meanwhile, please desist from sarcastically arguing with straw men (statements that you originate but then attribute to others, e.g. decreasing life expectancy, radiation with no specific goal, "gigantic conspiracy"), or if you insist on arguing with straw men, at least leave me out of it.
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curious2 says
It's not a strawman when it's true. A different poster wrote this:
ttt says
To which you replied:
curious2 says
You certainly appear to be saying life expectancy is decreasing. (decrease is usually considered the opposite of increase)
And you are greatly overestimating the radiation risks from normal medical diagnostic procedures. They are barely above the noise of background radiation. You might as well stop eating bananas if you're that worried about the radiation...
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tatupu70 says
I don't think that appears at all. Life expectancy is the net result of many factors, some favorable and others unfavorable. Describing an airplane in flight, you can accurately say that lift from the wings pulls it up, and gravity pulls it down, without saying that it's soaring into space or crashing into the ground. As I stated above, life expectancy has increased, mainly for reasons having nothing to do with "preventive care."
Or, consider history. The first five presidents lived a median of 82 years, without any modern medicine. Today, the average American dies younger than that. That doesn't mean life expectancy overall is decreasing; to the contrary, it has increased. But, the _reasons_ life expectancy has increased are primarily the reasons I listed.
Also, medical spending (the topic of the original post) doesn't just fall from the sky. It comes at the expense of other priorities. Here in California, the state is increasing medical spending while cutting state university budgets, even though education is a better predictor of longevity than medical insurance or money.
As for overestimating the risks from radiation, I have not estimated or overestimated anything; rather I have cited estimates published by the New England Journal of Medicine (above) and the American Medical Association (http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/169/22/2071). And, radiation is only one of the ways "preventive care" can shorten lives. Unnecessary procedures can lead to all sorts of complications, including fatal complications. If you focus solely on radiation, and say that one tree isn't a forest by itself, you haven't disproved the entire forest because you haven't even looked at all the other trees.
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curious--
You seem to be changing your point with each post. Which is OK. But don't pretend that you've been saying the same thing each time.
Maybe you're just not very good at saying what you mean.
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tatupu70 says
The point hasn't changed at all, and the words are plain to see on the screen. In light of the instruction not to insult another user (which you seem to have ignored), I will refrain from commenting on your ability to read. I did respond to specific questions, and if you believe that you can provide better written answers to those questions, please do.
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curious2 says
Did I miss something? When did he insult you?
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elliemae says
I hesitate to respond to those questions, because internet forums can sometimes devolve into daytime TV talk show fights where people throw virtual chairs at each other, and it doesn't accomplish anything. Some people like to pick fights, apparently that must be popular because it gets ratings. I will say though that I am not a pretender, I say what I mean, and I never said life expectancy was decreasing. I said services marketed as "preventive care" had not been a boon to life expectancy, in fact they often have the opposite effect, for example the excessive diagnostic radiation. Some people walk into bars looking for fights, it's just what they like to do, and if you check a user's history and see insults flying back and forth (http://patrick.net/forum/comments.php?a=2670&submit=Search) it's likely you've found an example. I do try to answer specific questions, and if people have something useful to say that's great, but I don't feel like wasting time on people who just want to pick fights.
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curious2 says
Good point. But those shows do make money don't they.
What does that say about how f--d up humans really are at a fundamental level? "Psychotic apes" is the term one cynical blogger used.
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wthrfrk80 says
Funny you mention apes - I had chosen not to respond to the earlier comment about avoiding bananas. Of course bananas have actual benefits, while unnecessary diagnostic ("preventive") radiation does not. But, it might have been amusing to see two somewhat evolved apes using the Internet to fight over bananas.
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I meant to respond earlier to this, and today an article reminded me of it.
tatupu70 says
Countless studies have shown that diagnostic radiation increases the risk of cancer, and today I happened to see one that shows dental x-rays increase the risk of non-malignant, but seriously symptomatic, brain tumors:
http://www.webmd.com/brain/news/20120410/dental-x-rays-linked-brain-tumors
This is in addition to X-rays in children doubling the risk of childhood leukemia:
http://www.gaia-health.com/articles351/000396-xrays-double-cancer-children.shtml
A single chest or dental x-ray delivers the equivalent of almost a whole year's background radiation:
http://www.doh.wa.gov/ehp/rp/factsheets/factsheets-htm/fs10bkvsman.htm
So, saying the risks of diagnostic radiation are barely above background is dangerously misleading. Diagnostic radiation increases the risk of cancer and symptomatic tumors, and should be avoided unless the expected benefits outweigh those risks.
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curious2 says
I think I see what you're suggesting which is that the 300mrem dose is equal to the annual 300mrem does. But that doesn't match the pie chart. How can I only get 19% of annual radiation from man-made sources, but have a dental dose equal to the nearly the whole year?
And this statement also seems to contradict that idea:
On the average, doses from a diagnostic x-ray are much lower, in dose effective terms, than natural background radiation.
I'm guessing what I'm missing is in that term "dose effective."
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FunTime says
I meant to type "is nearly equal to the 360mrem annual dose." Hopefully I've remembered that number correctly, as I didn't look at the link again.
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FunTime says
Your personal percentages depend on how often you get yourself irradiated. Many people go years without diagnostic radiation, and get hardly any radiation except for background. Some people go in for diagnostic x-rays (mammography, dental, etc.) every six months, so they raise the average. A growing number of people get C-T scans, which would raise the average even further; most of these are not reflected in the pie chart, which is based on data from 2007.
ObamaCare eliminates co-pays for mammograms, even in age groups that derive no net benefit from them. The stated purpose is to encourage women to get irradiated more often. Of course, they don't phrase it quite that way. They try to make it sound like routine diagnostic radiation is a "benefit," because the spending benefits the providers that sell it.
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Age is not the only factor in preventive care. Family history and other risk factors become important. It becomes a personal matter that should not be decided by bureaucrats on the basis of age or aggregate effect. If breast cancer runs in a patient's family, then she needs to have a mammogram covered even if she is young. Whereas another woman might decide to wait until later, because for her the radiation presents the greater risk. ObamaCare does not mandate that anyone get a mammogram, but it's great that women who need one can get it covered without a fight.
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curious2 says
It is a benefit if you are at risk. Mammograms are a real pain in the ass as per women I've talked to. I don't really believe that eliminating the copay is going to result in women rushing out to get extra mammograms just because they can. Gee what should I do today, go shopping, get a perm, lunch with the girlfriends, get a mammogram? Tough choices.
If obamacare eliminated copays on colonoscopies (literally a pain in the ass) I still wouldn't be getting them any more the the minimum recommended.