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  1. #1
    MarkM's Avatar
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    IBD Article: Health Care Here and Over There

    Health Care Here And Over There
    By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, August 12, 2009 4:20 PM PT

    http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticle ... 4250188090


    Reform: If the world's most famous physicist, Stephen Hawking, is a shining example of British health care, how is it that others in the U.K. are repeatedly denied critical care and medicine?

    In commenting on efforts to overhaul American's health care system, we have tried to pull back the curtain and pay attention to those trying to clone the systems of Canada and Britain. But supporters of government-run health care frequently ignore some of the less-pleasant facts.

    Much has been made of this statement in one of our Aug. 3 editorials: "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K. where the National Health Service would say the quality of life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."

    It was a bad example, and we have acknowledged that. To repeat the correction we ran shortly after the editorial ran: Hawking, who suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the progressive neurodegenerative disease often referred to as Lou Gehrig's Disease, is indeed a British subject.

    We also say that not everyone suffering from a debilitating disease is Stephen Hawking, and we hope our critics would acknowledge that. Hawking is a renowned theoretical physicist, university professor and best-selling author. It is doubtful any National Health Service bureaucrat would cut him off.

    Hawking, in response to a query from London's Guardian newspaper that was apparently prompted by our editorial, was quoted Tuesday as saying: "I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived."

    We accept this testimony and good fortune. We will note, however, that in talking about his disability on his own Web site, Hawking makes no mention of NHS and instead says that since 1985, when he had a tracheotomy, he has had "24-hour nursing care . . . made possible by several foundations."

    Many other Britons may not be as fortunate, and we wonder how they might fare under similar circumstances in their later years. For example, many British women whose breast cancer mortality rates is nearly twice that of American women have been denied care in relative obscurity.

    We suspect the concern in the U.K. (and the U.S.) over our editorial is similar to a diversionary tactic used here in the Colonies. When you don't want to talk about some of the realities of government-run medical care, you change the subject. You may call elderly town hall protestors a coached mob.

    It's easy to ignore the fact that data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development, hardly a right-wing organization, show that the U.K.'s heart-attack fatality rate is almost 20% higher than America's, and that angioplasties in Britain are only 21.3% as common as they are here.

    Or it's easy to forget that in March, the U.K.'s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) ruled against the use of two drugs, Lapatinib and Sutent, that prolong the life of those with certain forms of breast and stomach cancer.

    So it's no surprise to discover that while breast cancer in America has a 25% mortality rate, in Britain it's almost double at 46%. Prostate cancer is fatal to 19% of American men who get it; in Britain it kills 57% of those it strikes. We are not making this up.

    Betsy McCaughey, former lieutenant governor of New York and an adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, wrote on Feb. 9 on Bloomberg.com that in 2006, a U.K-based board decreed that elderly patients with macular degeneration had to wait until they went blind in one eye before they could get a costly new drug to save the other eye. It took three years to get that outrageous decree reversed.

    As National Review Online's Deroy Murdock points out, the Orwellian-named NICE just unveiled plans to cut annual steroid injections for severe back pain from 60,000 to 3,000.

    "The consequences of the NICE decision will be devastating for thousands of patients," Dr. Jonathan Richardson of Bradford Hospitals Trust told London's Daily Telegraph. "It will mean more people on opiates, which are addictive and kill 2,000 a year. It will mean more people having spinal surgery, which is incredibly risky and has a 50% failure rate."

    And here we thought the first rule of medicine was to do no harm.

    According to Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution, British patients wait about twice as long as Americans — sometimes more than a year — to see a specialist, have elective surgery such as hip replacement or get radiation treatment for cancer. In Britain, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.

    The U.S. has 34 CT scanners per million citizens compared with eight in Britain. The U.S. has almost 27 MRI machines per million compared with about six per million in Britain. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40% higher than in America.

    David Gratzer, a physician and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, says the difference is that in the U.S., internists recommend that men 50 and older get screened for colon cancer. In the National Health Service in the U.K., screening begins at 75.

    Avastin, a drug for advanced colon cancer, is prescribed more often in the U.S. than in the U.K., by some estimates as much as 10 times more.

    As mentioned, British patients wait longer to see specialists. Gratzer notes that a clinical oncology study of British lung cancer treatment found that 20% "of potentially curable patients became incurable on the waiting list."

    The problem may lie in the NHS' vast bureaucracy. As Daniel Hannan, a member of the European Parliament from southeast England, stated:

    "We have 1.4 million people employed by the National Health Service. It is the third biggest employer in the world after the red army in China and the Indian National Railways. Most of those 1.4 million people are administrators, (and) managers outnumber the doctors and nurses."

    National health care can be less effective medicine. We sincerely regret the mistake we made about Hawking.

    But our criticism of the government-run systems that operate in Britain and Canada, and which Congress seems determined to have us adopt with few questions asked, is still valid.
    Remember that*all Politicians work for us, the U.S. Taxpaying Citizens.* If they are not doing their jobs to your liking, FIRE THEM in the next elections.

  2. #2
    Senior Member Dianne's Avatar
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    Let us not forget this example of government "care" in the most prestigious hospital, Walter Reid:

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01172.html


    Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army's Top Medical Facility

    By Dana Priest and Anne Hull
    Washington Post Staff Writers
    Sunday, February 18, 2007; Page A01

    Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan's room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.
    This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.


    Photos
    The Wounded and Walter Reed
    Five and a half years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre Walter Reed Army Medical Center into a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients.


    TRANSCRIPT
    Recovering at Walter Reed
    Reporters Dana Priest and Anne V. Hull discuss their recent stories about Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

    Play Video
    VIDEO | Post's Priest on Walter Reed Hearings



    The common perception of Walter Reed is of a surgical hospital that shines as the crown jewel of military medicine. But 5 1/2 years of sustained combat have transformed the venerable 113-acre institution into something else entirely -- a holding ground for physically and psychologically damaged outpatients. Almost 700 of them -- the majority soldiers, with some Marines -- have been released from hospital beds but still need treatment or are awaiting bureaucratic decisions before being discharged or returned to active duty.
    They suffer from brain injuries, severed arms and legs, organ and back damage, and various degrees of post-traumatic stress. Their legions have grown so exponentially -- they outnumber hospital patients at Walter Reed 17 to 1 -- that they take up every available bed on post and spill into dozens of nearby hotels and apartments leased by the Army. The average stay is 10 months, but some have been stuck there for as long as two years.

    Not all of the quarters are as bleak as Duncan's, but the despair of Building 18 symbolizes a larger problem in Walter Reed's treatment of the wounded, according to dozens of soldiers, family members, veterans aid groups, and current and former Walter Reed staff members interviewed by two Washington Post reporters, who spent more than four months visiting the outpatient world without the knowledge or permission of Walter Reed officials. Many agreed to be quoted by name; others said they feared Army retribution if they complained publicly.

    While the hospital is a place of scrubbed-down order and daily miracles, with medical advances saving more soldiers than ever, the outpatients in the Other Walter Reed encounter a messy bureaucratic battlefield nearly as chaotic as the real battlefields they faced overseas.

    On the worst days, soldiers say they feel like they are living a chapter of "Catch-22." The wounded manage other wounded. Soldiers dealing with psychological disorders of their own have been put in charge of others at risk of suicide.

    Disengaged clerks, unqualified platoon sergeants and overworked case managers fumble with simple needs: feeding soldiers' families who are close to poverty, replacing a uniform ripped off by medics in the desert sand or helping a brain-damaged soldier remember his next appointment.

    "We've done our duty. We fought the war. We came home wounded. Fine. But whoever the people are back here who are supposed to give us the easy transition should be doing it," said Marine Sgt. Ryan Groves, 26, an amputee who lived at Walter Reed for 16 months. "We don't know what to do. The people who are supposed to know don't have the answers. It's a nonstop process of stalling."

    Soldiers, family members, volunteers and caregivers who have tried to fix the system say each mishap seems trivial by itself, but the cumulative effect wears down the spirits of the wounded and can stall their recovery.

    "It creates resentment and disenfranchisement," said Joe Wilson, a clinical social worker at Walter Reed. "These soldiers will withdraw and stay in their rooms. They will actively avoid the very treatment and services that are meant to be helpful."

    Danny Soto, a national service officer for Disabled American Veterans who helps dozens of wounded service members each week at Walter Reed, said soldiers "get awesome medical care and their lives are being saved," but, "Then they get into the administrative part of it and they are like, 'You saved me for what?' The soldiers feel like they are not getting proper respect. This leads to anger."

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