http://www.allcountries.org/ranks/preventable_deaths_country_ranks_1997-1998_2002-2003_2008.html

NOTES:

This study compared trends in deaths considered amenable to health care before age seventy-five between 1997–98 and 2002–03 in the United States and in eighteen other industrialized countries.

Such deaths account, on average, for 23 percent of total mortality under age seventy-five among males and 32 percent among females.

The decline in amenable mortality in all countries averaged 16 percent over this period. The United States was an outlier, with a decline of only 4 percent. If the United States could reduce amenable mortality to the average rate achieved in the three top-performing countries, there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths per year by the end of the study period.

The authors also note that “it is difficult to disregard the observation that the slow decline in U.S. amenable mortality has coincided with an increase in the uninsured population, an issue that is now receiving renewed attention in several states and among presidential candidates from both parties.

“It is startling to see the U.S. falling even farther behind on this crucial indicator of health system performance,” said Commonwealth Fund Senior Vice President Cathy Schoen. “By focusing on deaths amenable to health care, Nolte and McKee strip out factors such as population and lifestyle differences that are often cited in response to international comparisons showing the U.S. lagging in health outcomes. 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”.

In 1997–98 the U.S. ranked 15th out of 19 countries on the “mortality amenable to health care” measure. However, by 2002–03 the U.S. fell to last place, with 109 deaths amenable to health care for every 100,000 people. In contrast, mortality rates per 100,000 people in the leading countries were: France (64), Japan (71), and Australia (71). The other countries included in the study were Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Study authors state that the measure of deaths amenable to health care is a valuable indicator of health system performance because it is sensitive to improved care, including public health initiatives. It considers a range of conditions from which it is reasonable to expect death to be averted even after the condition develops. This includes causes such as appendicitis and hypertension, where the medical nature of the intervention is apparent; it also includes illnesses that can be detected early with effective screenings such as cervical or colon cancer, and tuberculosis which, while acquisition is largely driven by socio-economic conditions, is not fatal when treated in a timely manner.

“Cross-national studies conducted by The Commonwealth Fund indicate that our failure to cover all Americans results in financial barriers that are much more likely to prevent many U.S. adults from getting the care they need, compared with adults in other countries,” said Commonwealth Fund President Karen Davis. “While no one country provides a perfect model of care, there are many lessons to be learned from the strategies at work abroad.”

Debbie Hawle

Please explain to me why they should have to foot the bill? Why shouldnt the person making 40,000 a year not give a extra 10% of his income to ENSURE u have Health care. If this continues dont fool yourself. ALL UR TAXS WILL increase as they have “Overruns and Unforseen cost” hahaha

I dont think its fair that the top 50% of this countrys working people have to pay for the bottom 50%. They work hard for there money and time away from there familys to be FORCED into given up more and more. Of what they have worked so hard for. Shame on you for thinking anything differant. I give to non-profits. That should be my choice. Not you forcing yet another “U HAVE TO DO THIS OR ELSE” crap.

Enough with the taxes…..STOP

You would “sound” a lot more intelligent and informed if you wrote less like
a 5th grader.

that is how this country was founded too by the way

M.R..A.C.W.

I watch Fox40 news everyday. People over here don’t understand why it is such a deal concerning health care, and why is people getting violent behind this. People can still have private insurance, and national health care as a backup.

You are so right. I don’t understand America,and I was born and raised there. We are suppost to be free to do we want basically want. The land of the free,the home of the brave. Well if this true,what is the problem with free health care for those who need it? If we are so brave why we step up to the plate and help one another? Be a doer’s don’t complain. When we leave this world, we can’t take earthly treasures with us it will go to someone else. Think about it please?

I went bed one night sound mind and body. I wokeup the next morning,and my life was changed. This was in 1986. I have M.S. With small children. A 3 year old little boy,and a baby girl in diapers. This was a devasting thing for me. My marriage fell apart and I was left to raise my children alone. The stress for me going threw this divorce kept me in and out of the hospital. I couldn’t get any Medical coverage,because the insurance companies were afraid of me. All they could is dollar signs and how they would lose money caring for me. I had no choice,but to file bankruptcy. I am living in England now. I have a girlfriend whom is British. We became good friends. Her family took me under their wing. As we all know Britian has National Health Insurance. I am a recipiant. I am taken care of . Doctors make home vistits here. Yes, I am blessed in one way. My medical is and dental is covered. I had a deciscion to make come to England and get care leaving my love ones behind, or stay there with my love ones and no insurance. I could not be a burden on my kids. I have grandchildren now. I do allot of crying why? because I had to make a choice in a country that is suppose to be all of that and a bag of chips with no holes. We don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring. I was just getting a good career going. Went to sleep, wokeup and my life was completly changed. This could happen to anybody. Oh the neurologist that diagnosed, wouldn’t see me anymore,because I had no insurance. When I get back home, I am going to make an appointment see him. This health bill is a blessing from the Lord. Quess what everybody? I can now go back and enjoy my love ones. YES THIS IS TRULEY A BLESSING FROM THE LORD!

Some people cannot stand to see others get help without some company making a profit from it. I get sick and tired of hearing about France being so good to their people. Although I mean no disrespect to them, I only envy them. America has become a place full of arrogance and you can see it by the way people abuse freedom.

But you know. A single step in the right direction is better than a single promise played over and over and over like we have seen from Republicans for years. Its good to see we finally have a President that isn’t the same white trash as before. And I’m white.

Members of Congress and their staffers currently select their health insurance plan from the pool of health care policy options that are available to all federal employees. But under the new law, unlike other federal employees, they will be required to purchase their insurance from the state-run exchanges when that part of the law goes into effect in 2014.

But the provision appears to exclude leadership and committee staff, giving the appearance that those who wrote the bill wrote themselves out of this requirement.

The White House is also exempt from moving from the current federal employee plan to state-run exchanges, although the White House said Wednesday that Obama will participate in the exchanges if he is still president in 2014.

Throwing bricks through windows and making death threats? Good Grief! Does anyone else see this as embarrassing ? You know this is on tv’s around the world with a million different spins, and they are all bad.

Strangely, despite having had our Medicare system in place for most of my working life, we have not become a socialist state, and I don’t really miss the % of my income that goes to fund the system. As a friend of mine just pointed out to me… if he’d lived in the US when he had his heart attack chances are he’d be dead or bankrupt (or both).

Wait a minute, now who just said that?

Sorry, just had to rub that in. Have a nice evening.

By the way, I have been involved in cost accounting for most of the last four decades. I know how business works.

1). “Don’t tax corporations, it makes no sense, they just pass the costs along to their customers”.

Um, really? It makes no difference at all? Well, if that were true, then corporations simply wouldn’t care. There would be no lobbying, no anti-government rants, no high profile representations from well-paid politicians, no under the radar industry groups quietly working behind the scenes. Business simply wouldn’t care and wouldn’t bother. Why spend the money? Pass the costs along to the customer and the problem is solved!

Here’s a thought. Maybe it does matter. Maybe taxes can be paid out of many different pockets. Maybe the customers sometimes ante up and maybe sometimes it’s the corporate bottom line. Maybe a higher cost structure sometimes forces the company reorganize their products, markets and expense picture. Just a thought.

2. “Citizens need to take responsibility for their health care. If they don’t get insurance then they bear the consequences”.

True but it fails to account for human nature (weird since conservatives are usually better at accounting for human nature). The healthy rarely plan for sickness (it’s a bit of a downer). Young adults often believe they are invincible and will neither grow old nor lose their health. So while conservatives love to get on their high horse about this, the truth is you have to force people to pay while they are healthy. Because the average citizen doesn’t have the money to pay once they are sick.

Now what’s the problem with simply sticking it to all these poor, deluded, insurance-less (or under-insured) people? Well, if you don’t mind living in a world where people die because they have easily treatable illnesses, except for the money, nothing!

The problem is the people. They have hearts. Most citizens aren’t ready to simply let their neighbors die or languish. You get fund appeals for children, and adults, and the heart-rending stories they have to tell. So you wind up paying anyway. Ah, but you are a cold, heartless bastard, and you never contribute to these fundraising appeals you say!

It doesn’t matter. Every medical organization already has a charity component to their budget. Even if you don’t mean to, or know it, the costs of those charity treatment allocations are built in to your medical costs. There’s no way you can escape paying.

Therefore the smart move is to force people to pay while they have the money to pay. And that’s when they are healthy. If you fail to do so you fail to account for human nature. Failing to account for human nature is simply a good way to fail.

But do continue to rant on about Socialism & Communism. You sound intelligent and sophisticated when you do that, really! Socialism & Communism failed because they too, failed to account for human nature.

“If you chose to live an unhealthy lifestyle why is my responsibilty to rpovide you with health care? When I found out Jerry Garcia “bought” his way onto the donor list for a new liver I was shocked. This drunk, cocaine smoking idiot got a liver that probably should have gone to a resposible recipient went to this idiot who after receiving the new liver continued to drink and party. All this new insurance is going to do is enable more people to make poor choices about their lifestyles.”

For your information, it was Phil Lesh, not Jerry Garcia who had a liver transplant. Lesh quit drinking a long time before his liver transplant, which btw, was needed due to him having Hepatitis C. In the decades since his liver transplant, Phil Lesh has done extensive fundraising for, and has brought more awareness to organ donation than almost anyone else in the entertainment industry. Judging from your uninformed/nasty/poorly spelled comment, it is safe to say that it is you who is the idiot.

The fining of those who choose not to take healthcare that can afford it does make me scratch my head, but if the government insists on everyone having healthcare then they have to take measures to ensure this happens. You have 4 years to get a healthcare plan. We here in Canada, and our plan is both federal and provincial (state), get basic health care (Hospital care, emergency medical etc) for free, but we also have to have additional coverage to pay for things such as prescription medications, dentist visits, eye glasses etc….

Trust me folks, the plan you have in place may not be perfect, but it is much better than what there was in place prior to Sunday. Currently, I have an Aunt and her husband who live in Philadelphia and they pay 850.00 a month for coverage for the two of them. That isn’t even full coverage. 850.00 A MONTH!!! That is insane. Private insurance companies have been gouging Americans for years and with this bill that gouging will finally stop.

“If the hospital “pays”, they pass that cost on to the rest of us by charging the insurance companies more. As for costing more to treat an uninsured person, I don’t understand how it would cost more to fix a broken leg on one versus the other.”

FSM, have you actually THOUGHT about this? It’s not friggin’ black and white, and it says something about you that something that OBVIOUSLY requires more than sound-bite thought about DON’T TAKE MY MONEY WAH goes over your head.

Three reasons why it is more expensive to treat an uninsured person than an insured person:
- It is 3-4 times more expensive to treat someone in the emergency room than in the doctor’s office. If you do not have a real emergency, do not crowd the emergency room which will probably be partially full of people who have emergencies who actually CAN NOT wait a few days to deal with their problem.
- Hospitals lose millions because of this in uncompensated care because the bills for their treatment may be so absurdly high – tens of thousands of dollars – that it is unlikely they will be paid back in that person’s lifetime, much less a few years. The money that goes to compensate this will come out of your taxes, which will be a larger amount than what goes into your premium.
-Also, as I said, insured people have access to preventive care and regular check-ups, which decreases the likelihood that they’re going to end up in the hospital.

Thomas Jefferson was not nearly as unthinking about the issues of his day as you are about this. Either way, it irks me when anyone, conservative, liberal, or otherwise, invokes the names of the country’s founders just to try to score points in an argument.

If the hospital “pays”, they pass that cost on to the rest of us by charging the insurance companies more. As for costing more to treat an uninsured person, I don’t understand how it would cost more to fix a broken leg on one versus the other.

And I am not a conservative. I am a libertarian, like Thomas Jefferson.

This world is one in which existence can be precarious and in which it is almost always better to hang together than to hang separately, to quote Ben Franklin.

I don’t see how forcing someone to buy something they don’t want could possibly pass constitutional muster! The Federal government is not all-powerful regardless of what Obama thinks. (Go back and read the tenth amendment) If you can afford insurance and choose not to, that is your right. If you then need medical care, you – not the rest of us – pay for it.”

Actually, it ends up being the hospital that pays for it most of the time when people who get the care can’t pay it back. It costs more to treat an uninsured person than it does to treat an insured person. Add to that the costs incurred by not getting people the cumulatively far less expensive chronic treatment they need, if they have a chronic condition, and simple prevention, and you’re wasting a lot more money than you need to. Insurance isn’t just about the person; it’s also about the local area, who will pay more in taxes to local health care if they’re spending more on uninsured people. Really, are you that dense about how insurance actually works?

“If it bankrupts you that’s tough. You should have thought of that when you made that choice. If you don’t pay, you don’t play. It’s time liberals stop excusing people for not taking responsibility for their own lives. I don’t have a problem with helping people who really need it, but millions of the “uninsured” need to deal with their own problems.”

It’s not always about responsibility! Sometimes it’s about being dealt a bad hand and not perhaps having the luck to come into the resources one might be able to get – sure, there are plenty that pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but how many people who are also trying to do so are there for each person who beats the odds?

Criminy, you conservatives keep slinging words around but half of the time you have no idea what they mean and most of the time you don’t bring the evidence to support your assumptions.

Try a nuanced argument. It helps.

And forcing employers to pay for insurance is idiotic. They just put in their cost calculations, add their markup to it and pass it on to you. Instead of paying a dollar for health care, you pay that dollar plus the markup. That unshakable liberal idea of the free lunch just ain’t so!