US Medical System: The Worst in 19 Industrialized Nations

Reuters reports on a study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, authored by Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee, published in Health Affairs, a peer-reviewed journal:

France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday.

The study abstract:

We 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.

One hundred thousand deaths per year. You'd think Mike Huckabee would be all over this, after his statement about requiring immigrants for labor because we've been aborting people for 35 years:

Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our workforce," the former Arkansas governor said. "It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.

One hundred thousand deaths per year. We need immigrants because of aborted fetuses, but there's no need to stop killing 100,000 people unnecessarily because we don't have universal health care:

"I think health care in the U.S. is pretty good if you have access. But if you don't, I think that's the main problem, isn't it?" Nolte said in a telephone interview.

I have a little experience with universal health care, because I've lived in Canada for four years. It's taken me almost that long to stop asking people, "Have you seen a doctor for that?" when they talk about a health problem. Canadians look at you funny if you ask them that.