Lifespan is usually a pretty fair indicator of the quality of any nation's healthcare. And in the United States, whose healthcare the Right in Canada would like to adopt, well it's not so good. In fact, due strictly to inferior heathcare, Americans die sooner than the citizens of a dozen other nations.
This is the point at which Americans like to jump in and blame obesity, traffic accidents and a high murder rate for skewing the results, masking the reality that their healthcare is the best in the world.
Not this time, amigos.
A study just released by Columbia University factored in obesity, traffic accidents and murder and still found that American healthcare just doesn't cut it. From Reuters:
Columbia's Peter Muennig, who led the study published in the journal Health
Affairs, said his team accounted for these factors this time.
"But what really surprised us was that all of the usual suspects -- smoking,
obesity, traffic accidents, and homicides -- are not the culprits," Meunnig said
in a statement.
"The U.S. doesn't stand out as doing any worse in these areas than any of the
other countries we studied, leading us to believe that failings in the U.S.
health care system, such as costly specialized and fragmented care, are likely
playing a large role in this relatively poor performance on improvements in life
expectancy."
The 12 countries against which U.S. healthcare was compared were the only other countries studied. As in, the United States fell last - shall we say "dead last." Call it a wacky coincidence but those twelve countries that bested the United States all provide universal healthcare.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE69609H20101007?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100
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