While folks on both sides of the ideological divide continue to debate the efficacy of gummint-run health care, it may be instructive to see just how ineffective it is when compared to our "broken" system's ability to deal with cancer. For example, folks in Canada have a lower cancer survival rate than we do. And our friends the French, whose system was recently lauded by the World Health Organization as "the best in the world" ranks below even our Neighbors to the North.
Perhaps most surprisingly, the MVNHS© ranked fifth (out of five!), with some of the lowest cancer survival rates in the civilized world. Keep that upper lip stiff, old chaps!
And who says so? Why, that venerable (and venerated) medical journal, the Lancet. Kind of difficult to cast them as water carriers for private health insurance.
The Health Care BS blog has a telling graphic that tells the whole story.
[Hat Tip: Elizabeth A. Terrell]
UPDATE: On a related note, many pro-socialized-medicine folks like to pull out that old canard that such systems actually have lower infant mortality rates than ours. Although we've debunked this before, it bears repeating: it's a canard because it's demonstrably untrue.
How's that, you ask?
Simple: we value each and every life, and so we count every live birth regardless of the baby's life expectancy. Under gummint-run systems such as those in Canada and Germany (among many, many others), "(l)ow birth weight infants are not counted against the “live birth” statistics...a premature baby weighing 500g." [ed: 500g is a little over 1 pound]
Here, of course, such preemies are considered worth saving, and we do count them, which tends to skew the stats. Add to that the fact that these systems don't count babies who live less than a day or so, even though they were, in fact, live births. And again, we do, which also throws off the number crunchers.
In fact, those bastions of civilization, the Swedes, don't count babies who are deemed "too short." And once again, we do, and suffer the statistical consequences.
Randy Newman, eat your heart out..
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