100,000 dead. For no good reason except the executives at Aetna need another home in Gstaad. This number probably doesn't include people who "have health care" but not the kind that actually provides them with the care that will keep them well. Be proud, America, we've slipped to dead last on the list of industrialized nations when it comes to providing citizens health care.
Mandatory insurance won't cut it. "Working with insurance companines" won't cut it. The toll of needlessly dead Americans is going to rise, and rise, and rise...all while we spend what could pay for total universal coverage on the sands of Iraq and put in the pockets of the already rich. What will it take? What will finally get people to understand- "profit" and "health care" don't mix? Ever?
Universal health care isn't that hard. It's a simple matter of saying, "which DoD programs can we do without?" Start with Star Wars, and end the occupation of Iraq. Right there, that's five, perhaps ten years of universal coverage for all Americans. Get rid of Bush's tax cuts for the uberwealthy, and you've got another decade or two. Tax insurance companies and other big corporations properly, and that's even more health care for all. I can go on and on with a list of things that could pay for universal health care, even the 'bloated and inefficient' gummint kind. What about the candidates?
I'm currently caring for elderly family members. It's draining, stressful, and hard. I know I'm not alone, not by a long shot. Because the people I care for are outliers, I know that a lot of people my age are about to/beginning to experience what I have. It's not pretty. It sucks to worry that my family will suffer, not because any of them have failed to work hard, pay their taxes, have a savings and plan for retirement. And I do worry, because there is literally nothing I, or they can do, when Big Blue gives us the runaround. Which is frequently. Don't get me started on how much better those I care for would be, had the preventative programs they needed been around back when it would've made a difference. Oh well, someone is getting rich of the more expensive treatment they pay for today. I suppose that's the whole point.
Do you think of yourself as food? Or as an animal slaughtered to fill the belly of a vanity hunter? Because that's what you are, literally. So long as we sustain the fantasy that it's a "moral value" to pay people to deny others life saving care, this is how it's going to be.
When I dream about Revolution, I dream that it starts when enough boomers' children rise up and say, "No! I won't watch my mom die in excruciating pain because she can't afford drugs to deal with her cancer." I am saying it, who wants to join me?
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday.
If the U.S. health care system performed as well as those of those top three countries, there would be 101,000 fewer deaths in the United States per year, according to researchers writing in the journal Health Affairs.
Researchers Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine tracked deaths that they deemed could have been prevented by access to timely and effective health care, and ranked nations on how they did.
They called such deaths an important way to gauge the performance of a country's health care system.
Nolte said the large number of Americans who lack any type of health insurance -- about 47 million people in a country of about 300 million, according to U.S. government estimates -- probably was a key factor in the poor showing of the United States compared to other industrialized nations in the study.
"I wouldn't say it (the last-place ranking) is a condemnation, because I think health care in the U.S. is pretty good if you have access. But if you don't, I think that's the main problem, isn't it?" Nolte said in a telephone interview.
In establishing their rankings, the researchers considered deaths before age 75 from numerous causes, including heart disease, stroke, certain cancers, diabetes, certain bacterial infections and complications of common surgical procedures.
Such deaths accounted for 23 percent of overall deaths in men and 32 percent of deaths in women, the researchers said.
France did best -- with 64.8 deaths deemed preventable by timely and effective health care per 100,000 people, in the study period of 2002 and 2003. Japan had 71.2 and Australia had 71.3 such deaths per 100,000 people. The United States had 109.7 such deaths per 100,000 people, the researchers said.
After the top three, Spain was fourth best, followed in order by Italy, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, Greece, Austria, Germany, Finland, New Zealand, Denmark, Britain, Ireland and Portugal, with the United States last.
PREVIOUS RANKINGS
The researchers compared these rankings with rankings for the same 19 countries covering the period of 1997 and 1998. France and Japan also were first and second in those rankings, while the United States was 15th, meaning it fell four places in the latest rankings.
All the countries made progress in reducing preventable deaths from these earlier rankings, the researchers said. These types of deaths dropped by an average of 16 percent for the nations in the study, but the U.S. decline was only 4 percent.
The research was backed by the Commonwealth Fund, a private New York-based health policy foundation.
"It is startling to see the U.S. falling even farther behind on this crucial indicator of health system performance," Commonwealth Fund Senior Vice President Cathy Schoen said.
"The fact that other countries are reducing these preventable deaths more rapidly, yet spending far less, indicates that policy, goals and efforts to improve health systems make a difference," Schoen added in a statement.
...I'm reminded of a conversation I had with one of my Libertarian friends. He went to England for a little while, and when there, he needed health care, and didn't have "traveler's insurance." He got treated, well and efficiently, and at no charge.
Any time he gives me that "gummint is evil" crap, I remind him of his time abroad. It shuts him up, real quick. Even he's not hypocritical enough to deny that in his case, Evil Big Government saved him, when he couldn't have saved himself.
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CD, come on, dog, you know we can't be sayin'
keeping not-rich American citizens and residents alive is better than "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here."
It's the heart of terrorism to suggest that anything is more important than corporate profits.
Aetna, Cigna, hell even Blue Cross / Blue Shield ain't in it to take care of patients. Taking care of patients is for Medicare and Medicaid and the Breast Cancer and Cervical Cancer Treatment Acts so community block grant money can be used to seed non-profit organization "matching funds challenges" and make the moneybaggers cough up a tax shelter or two along the way.
Sucre Maria, madre de dios, not even a week in a new job helping indigent women get cancer screenings -- not even a week -- and already the rage is white-hot all the time.
You know, CD -- you're standing neck deep in the middle of it now, just like I was from '99-2003, and it motherjumping backshooting biscuiteating godforsaken s.u.c.k.s. what we do to women in this country.
Do you know what 200 percent of the poverty level is, in Texas, for a one-person household? $1,700 a month and change. For two people, though, it's only $2,282.00.
So if a woman is married, or has a child living under her roof, and her total gross household income is $2,283.00, she must have private health insurance.
Or she must find a doctor who will be willing to let her pay the cost of a mammogram -- a screening mammogram is a $1,200 procedure, and that's just the down payment; the full bill for a mammogram locally can exceed $5,000 EASILY, never mind the cost of a diagnostic procedure like an ultrasound or a biopsy -- down gradually. Most hospitals' "financial aid arrangements" folks chafe at the idea of collecting the $6,500 bill for bilateral mammography in $15-monthly bites. Some will do it, but it takes the next best thing to court orders and special acts of God to get them to do it.
NONE of her other expenses apply. Childcare costs? Tough. Insurance payments, rent, the cost of utilities or medications? Uh-uh, sorry, lady. Oh, and if she's paying $15 a month on her mammogram or her colposcopy, where can she turn for the next stage of treatment she needs?
Maybe, if she's very, very lucky -- if she has all the right paperwork -- she might be able to apply for Medicaid. No guarantee she'll be accepted, though.
What in the name of the seven bald steers do we think we're doing in this country, treating our fellow human beings this way -- and then Huckabee and Phelps and Robertson and Dobson have the gall to call themselves followers of Christ, and use their pulpits to urge their followers to charity that enriches their Sunday-morning gladhanders, while all about them their neighbors are dying?
And we can blow $455 billion dollars on a war that hasn't got a stinking thing to do with finding bin Laden or stopping al Qaeda?
Please.
We can admit that we're killers ... but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes! Knowing that we're not going to kill today! ~ Captain James T. Kirk, Stardate 3193.0
Why I don't do mammograms, even "free"
First of all I expect the rule of "it's worth what it costs" applies here too. If I'm gonna get my tits squoze that hard there is gonna be some fun involved and not just timewasting.
Sarah nails the real reason though:
A "free cancer screening day!" has two possible results: you get a "clean bill of health" which is, as noted, worth what you paid for it, or you get a beep-beep-beep-red-alert notice which does nothing. Nothing good anyway.
--You still have no way of paying for further investigation/testing (which might reveal the original alert as a false positive which is horrifyingly common);
--you, assuming you gave your right name (cough) at the testing are now in searchable records everywhere as having a disease;
--you will, if unemployed, now as a result of that never get hired anywhere, and if working, very likely lose your job;
--and if by some chance you are working at a place which has insurance, which you have been paying some dreadful percentage of your income for, be dropped by said insurance.
What a deal, huh? You are now unemployed, uninsurable, have a "preexisting condition" for the rest of time, and your dependents if any are equally fucked.
No thank you. I will wait till the condition either goes away on its own (which it usually does) or gets really big and gross and disgusting looking. At which point I will go to the nearest town big enough to have a TV station (having alerted all my blogbuddies of my action), and give an impassioned political oration of some vehemence. But no profanity once the cameras show up.
I will then disrobe on the steps of the most heavily traffiked building in town, so as to display the stigmata, and talk about the Healthcare Crisis In This Country.
And wait to be tasered, hopefully while the crowd and the cameras are still around. :)
Xan, I can't tell you how to live
but I can tell you that it isn't just statistics that prove you will live longer if you catch the earliest possible stages of cancer, and you will have more choices in how, or if, you can treat it.
Sarah, thank you, but
I was trying to agree with you. You have "choices" about living longer only if you are worth keeping alive. That means having money, since money=worth.
I have no money. I am not worth keeping alive. Check CD's post on the story about where the US ranks on rate of death from preventable diseases. Hint: dead last, you should pardon the expression.
Therefore I will not live no matter what stage my (entirely hypothetical) cancer is caught at. Catching it "early" will only make me, or you for that matter, depressed. Why bother?
I am not worth keeping alive, under our system as presently constituted. Anybody who wonders why I support John Edwards as persistently as I do should keep in mind that he is the only fucking candidate who thinks I am worth keeping alive. That kinda means a lot to me.
Blood on the Tracks
(sung to Dylan's "Buckets of Rain")
Tumors of blood, tumors of pain
got nothing to lose and nothing to gain
do what they like, just like Bonny & Clyde
goddamn tumors always find a place to hide
I told the cancer to get out of the car
it moved too slow and then it moved too far
I tasered it to keep it in line
goddamn cancer does it to me every time
I locked it up in the county jail
it looked real sick so I gave it a pail
it looked at me as if I were mad
goddamn cancer, I shoulda kicked it in the nads
The cancer got a lawyer with a fancy degree
the judge was impressed and then he agreed
to let it go, told it "never come back"
goddamn cancer falling through a legal crack
At the end of the day we count up the score
we look at our life and we want some more
can't hide it away, can't save it no way
goddamn cancer ought to go the fuck away
++++