> For life saving care you are strictly better off in Canada, Australia or Britain.
I don't remember a single OECD measure that the US falls behind the UK in, perhaps child mortality at birth, so I'd be interested to know which life saving care you're referring to.
Moreover, as the nurse was teaching my class (in London) how to give CPR said "if you're going to have a heart attack, have it in America (because your chances of survival will be higher".
But maternal death (The number of person who die from pregnancy-related causes) is also more than 10 times higher than comparable countries and was raising for 20 years while other comparable countries were lowering it.
It seems an even worse picture of the situation. Adult women dying at 10 times the rate of OECD countries because of pregnancy. It will probably raise again given the new limitations/bans on abortion (accessible abortion is correlated with lower maternal death)
Life expectancy in the US is quite lower than comparable countries and stopped growing (but it might be related to the 8 to 10 times higher homicide rate than other OECD countries)
Death rate from HIV/AIDS is nearly 6 times higher than the UK and it’s not lowering anymore (it has plateaued at a much higher level than comparable countries)
Is there a health measure that you can find where the US is better or at least at the same level than say UK or at least France? (which is sadly for us French not the best in class…)
Not a trick question, I’m curious to see if the US have some outlier health measure that it aces, sometimes it happens!
> Not a trick question, I’m curious to see if the US have some outlier health measure that it aces, sometimes it happens!
I appreciate that, no worries.
Without looking I would go for any cancer statistic, as the UK is often terrible in those[1]. So, I did a search of the OECD Health Care Quality Indicators[2] (as they're the ones used to compare countries) to see if I was right. (As an aside, I look at these every few years and the last time I looked I found some surprising stats, like the ones about child mortality in the States, but occasionally there's a more complex reason behind a poor statistic[3]). Anyway, it seems I was (sadly) right:
## Breast cancer 5 year net survival
France 86.8 87.2 86.7
United Kingdom 79.8 83.8 85.6
United States 88.9 89.8 90.2
## Colon cancer 5 year net survival
France 60.7 63.6 63.7
United Kingdom 52.0 56.5 60.0
United States 64.7 65.5 64.9
Those are the age-standardised survival (%) spread across 3 different time periods (I didn't want to have to reproduce the whole thing so you don't get everything labelled!:)
Anyway, those are the first two I looked at. I've done this before and honestly, the US system holds up very well. I'm sure it does even better if it's adjusted for economic class - which obviously opens up a barrel of probably quite fair criticism. I know that some on here complain about how the US can bankrupt you if you get sick, but I'd take that over the UK's system in a heart beat. Not sure about France, though it does seem to have a more sane system than the UK.
5 year survival is not a particularly useful statistic though. Those people are not living longer, they're being diagnosed earlier. The all cause mortality hasn't been changed. Rates of regret for cancer treatment are quite high - people at the end of their life sometimes wish they'd spent more time doing stuff with family and less time getting unpleasant and painful treatment in hospital.
If you take every man over the age of 55 and provide rigorous diagnosis for prostate cancer, but you then provide zero treatment to anyone, your 5 year survival rates suddenly look really good. This is because you've diagnosed a lot of slow growing cancer that doesn't kill people. But obviously you've done nothing to improve all cause mortality or quality of life.
> Our findings suggest that there are no reliable relationships between changes in 5-year survival and cancer incidence or mortality. Increases in 5-year survival might therefore represent poor indicators of progress in cancer control at the population level. In the absence of over-diagnosis, 5-year survival might only indicate improved diagnosis and treatment in clinical practice.
Talking about health and healthcare, the facts show the US is at or very near the worst among OECD countries in: infant mortality, child health and safety, life expectancy at birth, healthy life expectancy, disability-adjusted life years, doctors per 1000 people, deaths from treatable conditions, rate of mental health disorders, rate of drug abuse, rate of prescription drug use.
Those measures might not be as damning as they first appear, as the reasons behind them can be complex. For example, rate of mental health disorders may be a case of the diagnosis fallacy, where an increased number of mental health professionals and access to mental health services means there are a greater number of mental health diagnoses. Just as a greater number of mental health diagnoses will occur in hospitals than at home, this does not mean that hospitals are dangerous for your mental health (although they may be;)
Life expectancy at birth is affected greatly by, among other things, gun violence in young men (I already shared in another comment an overview[2] of a paper[1] showing how this works). There is a quote[3] in the Guardian by the paper's lead author:
> “I was surprised by the sheer magnitude of the impact of firearm deaths, that they’re only 1%-2% of deaths in the US but responsible for 20% of the gap in life expectancy between the US and other countries in men,” said Andrew Fenelon, the lead author of the letter.
It's not enough to compare simple, bare statistics and come to a judgement that US healthcare is failing compared to other countries based on just that. I'm not an advocate for the US system but I do get the feeling that it can be unjustly maligned at times.
> Those measures might not be as damning as they first appear, as the reasons behind them can be complex. For example, rate of mental health disorders may be a case of the diagnosis fallacy, where an increased number of mental health professionals and access to mental health services means there are a greater number of mental health diagnoses.
Are you suggesting that the US is a special case among the 38 member countries of the OECD, and is the only one that has this phenomenon?
> Life expectancy at birth is affected greatly by, among other things, gun violence in young men
Which is just another way of saying the US needs better healthcare to deal with this major issue that it alone faces.
I don't remember a single OECD measure that the US falls behind the UK in, perhaps child mortality at birth, so I'd be interested to know which life saving care you're referring to.
Moreover, as the nurse was teaching my class (in London) how to give CPR said "if you're going to have a heart attack, have it in America (because your chances of survival will be higher".