Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Study finds British national health care best in the world, US worst.
Wow, really? Worse than Somalia? Well, no, worst of the 11 modern Western countries we studied but that makes a crappy headline.
So what makes the US worst? Poor people lack health insurance. What makes Britain best? Everybody has health insurance.
How about actual result – lives being saved, for example?
“The only serious black mark against the NHS was its poor record on keeping people alive. On a composite “healthy lives” score, which includes deaths among infants and patients who would have survived had they received timely and effective healthcare, the UK came 10th.”Click to view full size
Here’s the PowerPoint – UK is number 1 in everything except saving lives, which is the actual point of a health care system. So what they’re really saying is Britain has the best health care bureaucracy in the world. I’m not impressed. Looks like the best place to get sick is Switzerland, which does not astonish me.
Again the Narrative remains consistent: Liberal policies are measured for success based on the amount of caring, money and alleged effort invested, never on the results achieved. Trophies are awarded for showing up, not for coming in best or first. Ribbons all around!
It’s about “sending messages”.
Perhaps I’m just noticing this, but there seems to be a trend in these study’s to prioritize items the authors consider important, regardless of whether or not it actually results in a better result for the constituents of the item.
As a non-native Minnesotan, I laugh each and every time I see reports from our Democrat Dominated Media Culture that “we’re number 1” at something (don’t get me wrong, having lived elsewhere and travelled extensively, DDMC in all cities/states do these incessant ranking reports, including NYC) because that’s just who we are, the best. Love us!! Must be all the iron in the water.
For example, every once in a while a study will reveal that ‘we’ are number 1 for public parks. One of the criteria is square footage of parks per resident. It doesn’t matter that the only people who use some parks are drug dealers – it matters that there is a place that is called a ‘park’ somewhere near where people live.
Another example – Minneapolis has been touted as a great place to be a person who identifies as a gay American. Then a recent study found that ‘we’ weren’t even in the top 10 of great places to be gay. Why? What do the study authors have against ‘us’? Well, one of the criteria the study authors found to be important was the ease of accomplishing a casual anonymous sexual hook-up. Now I can’t speak to whether that makes a city good or bad for gays. But it would seem to me that if you were pushing the notion that gays are just like everyone else – looking for that one special person to love for the rest of their life – ease of securing casual anonymous sex wouldn’t be a factor. We can’t be best in everything I suppose.
The left loves to measure success by inputs, the right by results. So spending a billion dollars on a problem is better than spending $500M? What if the $500M produced results, while the billion just created another unending entitlement?
But, I don’t want to go on the cart!
Here’s something I wrote on my blog back in 2005 about 21st century British healthcare, with excerpts from an article about a UK court granting hospitals the right to starve terminally ill patients to death. It’s long, but fitting:
(Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Scene 2)
CART MASTER: Bring out your dead!
CUSTOMER: Here’s one.
CART MASTER: Ninepence.
DEAD PERSON: I’m not dead!
CART MASTER: What?
CUSTOMER: Nothing. Here’s your ninepence.
DEAD PERSON: I’m not dead!
Terminally Ill Can Be Starved to Death, UK Court Rules
By Nicola Brent, CNSNews.com Correspondent, August 02, 2005(CNSNews.com) – An appeal court has denied a terminally ill British man the assurance that his wish not to be starved to death once he becomes incapacitated will be respected to the end.
Former mailman Leslie Burke, 45, has a progressively degenerative disease that although leaving him fully conscious, will eventually rob him of the ability to swallow and communicate.
He petitioned the High Court last year to ensure that he would not be denied food and water once he was no longer able to articulate his wishes.
CART MASTER: ‘Ere. He says he’s not dead!
CUSTOMER: Yes, he is.
DEAD PERSON: I’m not!
CART MASTER: He isn’t?
CUSTOMER: Well, he will be soon. He’s very ill.
DEAD PERSON: I’m getting better!
CUSTOMER: No, you’re not. You’ll be stone dead in a moment.
Burke won that right when judge James Munby ruled that if a patient was mentally competent — or if incapacitated, had made an advance request for treatment — then doctors were bound to provide artificial nutrition or hydration (ANH).
But last May, the General Medical Council (GMC) — the medical licensing authority — took the case to the Appeal Court, arguing that doctors had been placed “in an impossibly difficult position.”
The appeal judges have now agreed, overturning the High Court judgment and upholding GMC guidelines on how to treat incapacitated patients.
CART MASTER: Oh, I can’t take him like that. It’s against regulations.
DEAD PERSON: I don’t want to go on the cart!
CUSTOMER: Oh, don’t be such a baby.
CART MASTER: I can’t take him.
DEAD PERSON: I feel fine!
Those guidelines give doctors the final say in whether a patient should be given life-sustaining “treatment,” a term legally defined to include artificial feeding or hydration.
The latest ruling obliges doctors to provide life-prolonging treatment if a terminally ill and mentally competent patient asks for it.
However, once a patient is no longer able to express his or her wishes or is mentally incapacitated, doctors can withdraw treatment, including ANH, if they consider it to be causing suffering or “overly burdensome.”
Ultimately, the court said, a patient cannot demand treatment the doctor considers to be “adverse to the patient’s clinical needs.”
CUSTOMER: Well, do us a favour.
CART MASTER: I can’t.
CUSTOMER: Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won’t be long.
CART MASTER: No, I’ve got to go to the Robinsons’. They’ve lost nine today.
CUSTOMER: Well, when’s your next round?
CART MASTER: Thursday.
DEAD PERSON: I think I’ll go for a walk.
Anti-euthanasia campaigner and author Wesley Smith told Cybercast News Service it was important Burke had taken the case to court because “it is now clear that a patient who can communicate desires cannot have food and water withdrawn.
“That is a line in the sand that is helpful.”
However, he added, the judgment had “cast aside” those who were mentally incompetent or unable to communicate their wishes — “those who bioethicists call non-persons because of incompetence or incommunicability.
“I believe that the judgment clearly implies that the lives of the competent are worth more than the lives of the incompetent since doctors can decide to end life-sustaining medical care, including ANH,” said Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and author of “Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America.”
Burke was quoted as saying in reaction to the ruling that it held “no good news at all” for people who shared his concerns.
In the light of public health service cuts and underfunding, Burke said he was worried about “the decisions that will have to be made” by doctors in the future.
“I have come to realize that there are quite a few people who feel the same way I do,” the Yorkshire Post quoted him as saying. “Not everyone wants to be put down. Not everyone wants their life to be ended prematurely.”
CUSTOMER: You’re not fooling anyone, you know. Look. Isn’t there something you can do?
DEAD PERSON: [singing] I feel happy. I feel happy.
[Cart Master hits him in the head.]
Responding to the court’s ruling, the GMC said it should reassure patients.
The council’s guidelines made it clear “that patients should never be discriminated against on the grounds of disability,” said GMC President Prof. Graeme Catto in a statement.
“We have always said that causing patients to die from starvation and dehydration is absolutely unacceptable practice and unlawful.”
A professor of palliative medicine at Cardiff University, Baroness Ilora Finlay, supported the court ruling. “Stopping futile interventions allows natural death to occur peacefully,” she argued in a British daily newspaper. “This is not euthanasia by the back door.”
But the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) took a different view.
The commission was one of several campaigners, including right-to-life activists and patients’ groups, which had strongly supported Munby’s earlier ruling.
DRC Chairman Bert Massie expressed the group’s dismay at the Appeal Court decision, saying it did nothing to dispel the fears of many disabled people that “some doctors make negative, stereotypical assumptions about their quality of life.”
It had also “totally ignored” the rights of those who were unable to express their wishes, he added.
CUSTOMER: Ah, thanks very much.
CART MASTER: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
The Night Writer’s vote for the funniest line: “Ultimately, the court said, a patient cannot demand treatment the doctor considers to be ‘adverse to the patient’s clinical needs.’” You mean, such as, “Please don’t starve me to death?”
Switzerland is a very rich country, with rich citizens, so it’s no surprise that they have an effective medical system. But their system has several features Obama and his ilk would never put up with: the poor can’t even have a semi-private hospital room, for example. It’s highly regulated with tiers of service (public, semi-private, and private), private insurance required, relatively high deductibles to contain costs, and max insurance rates on par with O-care (8% of income for premiums, for example).
Overall, the Swiss system of mixed care is a lot better for the citizens than the state-run British Health Service, which is notorious for poor care.
And before you even think about comparing Canadian care, may I point out that when Canadian politicians get serious illnesses they come to the US for care? We Floridians used to joke about how many “emergencies” Canadians had when they wintered in Florida, since they could only get treatment for things that came up “suddenly” when they were in their winter homes. But given the wait times up in Canada (up to 6 months for some kinds of cancer treatment, for example), it was no surprise.
Speaking as a guy who’s actually done audits, when I see a survey that comes up with one entity being #1 on any number of areas, I tend to be suspicious that the whole survey was set up for the express purpose of promoting the model of that entity. In other words, the whole survey is a sham.
And the UK coming in pretty much #1 on everything but outcomes? It reminds me of the response of Japanese automakers to Ford when they completely redid the Taurus in the early 1990s. They all got a few samples for competitive analysis, of course, and what they found, according to many, is very telling;
Every part in the car was, in their view, a world class part, but the car itself was not world class–it didn’t have the unseen factors right, the je ne sais quois (sp?) that truly makes a car great.
Same thing with medicine. You can get independent boards coming up with criteria for good care, but if they don’t establish why those are important and test it with data, you’re done.
An example of the operation being a success, despite the death of the patient…
If the news reports and photos of Gay Pride parades I’ve seen are any indication, casual sex, hook-ups, and anonymous encounters are a very big part of the homosexual culture (if one actually exists).
JMO The Swiss system would be a good compromise.