[ymu]

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The willingness of people in the US to pay more to a middleman than purchase directly is bemusing. Why do US voters willingly spend so much for so little?

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No options other than our current medical industry?

[/ QUOTE ]If you mean because the politicians get elected with money from the HMOs and pharmaceutical industry and will be bought off or sacked if they try to prevent legalised theft...yeah, but it doesn't explain why US voters put up with it. Not to mention that education and social security make the biggest difference to life expectancy, but the poor and moderately well-off keep voting for cuts in services to provide tax cuts for the rich. [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

Oh yeah - you don't actually have any choice. No, neither do we; just one of two tyrannies every few years. Our lot just haven't quite finished the job of selling us all to the corporations yet. [img]/images/graemlins/mad.gif[/img]

That article linked to makes only partial sense. Life expectancy is increasing everywhere - saying that US life expectancy is rising so all must be well is not convincing in a context where it's rising worldwide and the US ranking has dropped from 11th to 42nd in 20 years.

The point on data collection methods is valid, and especially infant mortality. There are changing cultural issues here - stillbirth denies a birth certificate, proper burial and official acknowledgement that the child existed. Attitudes to this are changing, so the infant mortality figures are tough to interpret.

Prostate cancer and breast cancer are due to over-screening picking up low grade tumours that will not become lethal before the individual dies of something else; it just subjects people to unnecessary toxic treatment and a devastating diagnosis to blight their remaining lives. And makes the screening companies, drug companies and doctors rich. The UK used to make the same mistake with dentists until it was discovered that they were drilling holes in kids teeth in order to make money for filling them.

The main problem with the article is that it misses the point. It's not that the US is losing 6 years per capita on average - a lot of this is down to way healthier diets, better education and better welfare provision elsewhere. What makes no sense is that the US is willing to spend so much more than anywhere else for outcomes that are clearly not better than anywhere in the developed world. It's not a few dollars, it's 3x as much for something that is already expensive. How does anyone justify this? [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]