Universal Health Care Canada Style

Well, you can compare EU numbers with US numbers by listing the numbers for each of the EU Member States alongside those for the US ..

Below are the US, Canada and the "old" EU member states (the ones that've been part of EU policy for longer than two months ...). The summary would be that every single of the 15 EU Member States of past years has a lower infant mortality rate than the US.

2. Sweden 3,42 deaths/1,000 live births
5. Finland 3.73
8. Germany 4.23
9. Netherlands 4.26
10. Austria 4.33
12. France 4.37
15. Spain 4.54
16. Belgium 4.57
17. Luxembourg 4.65
20. Canada 4.88
21. Denmark 4.90
22. United Kingdom 5.28
23. Ireland 5.34
28. Portugal 5.73
31. Greece 6.12
33. Italy 6.19
35. United States 6.75

For completeness' sake, here's the 10 newly acceding EU Member States, that have not been part of EU policy making yet. Even two of the former communist states do better than the US. The US ranks between Taiwan and Croatia.

13. Slovenia 4.42
24. Czech Republic 5.37
25. Malta 5.62
40. Cyprus 7.54
43. Slovakia 8.55
44. Hungary 8.58
48. Poland 8.95
57. Estonia 12.03
68. Lithuania 14.17
70. Latvia 14.59

What about life expectancy? The influence of illegal immigrants would be much smaller here - after all, most of them are still young, they come here to work - few deaths to impact the overall stats. If the US has "the best health care system in the world", then it might show up in such an indicator of national health as life expectancy, right?

Here goes ... the lower the ranking, the better. Thirteen out of fifteen EU countries, as well as Canada, do better than the US.

202. Sweden 79.97 years
200. Canada 79.83 years
197. Italy 79.40 years
196. France 79.28 years
193. Spain 79.23 years
190. Greece 78.89 years
188. Netherlands 78.74 years
185. Germany 78.42 years
183. Belgium 78.29 years
182. Austria 78.17 years
181. United Kingdom 78.16 years
180. Finland 77.92 years
178. Luxembourg 77.66 years
175. Ireland 77.35 years
172. United States 77.14 years
171. Denmark 77.10 years
163. Portugal 76.35 years

Good diggin' nimh

Thanks, Habibi, i am currently in government bid proposal Hell, so i hadn't time yet to go out and look for that. None of it surprises me. I appreciate that you've saved me the trouble.

nimh, those number are means. What is more significant is the range to one standard deviation around the mean and how wide or narrow that range. Is any of that data available.

acq wrote : "nimh, those number are means. What is more significant is the range to one standard deviation around the mean and how wide or narrow that range. Is any of that data available. ... i worked for 25+ years in the life insurance industry; i can tell you one thing for sure : WHEN YOU'RE DEAD, YOU'RE DEAD !" . hbg

When your dead your dead is true, However those numbers do not deal with individuals, they deal with populations and present the average age at death in those populations. These ages are assumed to reflect the health and well being of those populations. Further the list compares populations and ranks them by average age at death, presumably indicating relative degrees of health and well being. But they also compare relatively homogeneous populations (Sweden) with heterogeneous populations (US). I would suspect that the US would have a relatively broad standard deviation, reflecting the diverse populations, environments , incomes, etc present in that country. I would suspect that Sweden would have a much more narrow range. But this is all speculation, I do not know.

But Acquiunk, despite McG's protestations about how we're comparing the US to Liechtenstein and such, we have now established something about the comparison with every single of last year's fifteen EU countries.

So that's not just some sleepy welfare state in Scandinavia - its France, the UK, Germany, Italy - countries with highly diverse populations and incomes ...

Let's compare states then. Do you have a list of US states and infant mortality rates?

You change the subject and we/nimh should provide the data?

However, I could perhaps find (offline) some data from a couple of German (if not all) states - unfortunately :wink: all all per capita mortality rate (and varying only minimal to the federal average, if I remember correctly).

Uhmm ... lessee. The average of all US states is worse than any of the 15 listed EU countries, resp. than 13 out of 15 listed EU countries.

I think I might be justified in guessing - just, you know, going on that bit right there, you know? - that a breakdown by state wont get you an awfully large proportion of individual US states suddenly outshining all of those EU countries that do better than the US average ...

... which somehow brings me back to Fox's assertions about "the fact that the United States is judged by EVERY measure to be the best in the world" and hell, that "every indicator I've ever seen ranks the U.S. health care system No. 1 in the world".

Every measure shows US health care to be the best in the world ... just, infant mortality and life expectancy happen to be in worse shape than in all or most all EU countries - and Hong Kong.

If you average the EU states, you get an average pretty darn close to the US. Try it out, it works.

The US is the third most populous country in the world. Compared to other well populated countries, we kick ass in healthcare. The US also has some of the highest crime percentages, and also a lot of unhealthy fat people and we produce plenty of pollution. Woohoo! The US sucks, but I would rather live in this sucky country than any other in the world.

I am not sure what the implications of all these statistics are supposed to prove, but I am done arguing about them.

Something about whether the US has the "best health system in the world" as claimed here in this thread, and whether or not said "fact" is reason to dismiss alternative systems like Canada's as inferior?

I mean, thats what this thread was about, right?

If you want to make it into another question of oh-whoa, America - love it or leave it, its up to you, but the thread was pretty specific enough.

See?:

Question: Is Canada's health system a better alternative?
Assertion: no, it cant be, because America has the best health system in the world
Statistics: all of the EU and Canada actually have 'better' scores on such measures as life expectancy and infant mortality.

I dont see how you "rather living in this sucky country than any other in the world" has any relevance to the question of what health care system might work better, at all, but it seems to be the staple McG answer to every critical discussion, so ... <shrugs>

Mixed bag when it comes to #1 in health care
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2004-05-04-health-care_x.htm

No comprehensive way to determine accuracy, but there is a tremendous amount of information at this site:
http://www.staff.city.ac.uk/r.h.plumb/bolnick.pdf

Interesting comparisons between U.S. and Canada
http://www.unitednorthamerica.org/simdiff.htm

Here's what the doctors say about the WHO ratings:
http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2000/08/28/gvsa0828.htm

Interesting piece about factors the WHO doesn't mention:
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-bandow011503.asp

Health care in the UK
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-bandow011503.asp

I dont know if you were implying that they were, but I dont know if the numbers about infant mortality and child expectancy above hail from the WHO ... All the website says is that "Portions of this site are based on public domain works from the U.S. Dept. of State and the CIA World Fact Book".

(In fact, I'll slip you an argument to use for your side, not from the National Review or anything but from that very WHO's website ... go to www.who.org , and look up the statistics about health personnel per country ;-))

Can't get the link to work Nimh. I actually am not disputing the numbers here. I just know sometimes you have to look deeper than the raw statistics to get the true picture.

Ah yeah. If you type in a URL here, A2K will automatically convert it into a link - but will include any , or . that you may have adjoined, so the link went to www-who-org-comma.

But type in www.who.org (for world health organisation, you know) and you'll get there.

Translation: I've failed to make my case using statistics, so i better hurry up and create a smoke screen if i'm going to save my weak case in this debate.

I haven't used a statistic one re #1 status Setanta so just go play okay?

Yeah, she hasn't used stats to back up her argument at all! So just lay off Set hehe

just to throw another two cents(canadian) into this dicussion. canada has the most diversified population in the world, plenty of poor people including a(small) native population with a very bad health/mortality record, yet canada still does somewhat better than the u.s. it seems there are otherfactors at work here. ... canada certainly has plenty of health/medical problems, the greatest being a shortage of "family physicians" in smaller communities. if the thread is still alive this weekend, i'll report on it. ... this just in : (watching cbc-tv news) the city of boston has signed a contract with a quebec internet pharmacy to supply drugs to the participants in the city's health plan; a delegation from california visiting winnipeg/manitoba to check out internet drug suppliers. ... canadian government warns drug suppliers to ensure that no shortage of drugs to canadian patients will develop or they may revoke their licenses. now that is getting serious ! maybe "arnold"(schwarzenegger) may have to do some serious body-building ? (i don't know why i wrote that). hasta la vista, baby ! hbg