My experience so far with the British health care system

By those numbers, our health system would grow to 8.5MM people.

Do you really think people in the UK are more susceptible to dying from breast cancer? It's not like it's a homogenous society.

 

Their population is 20% of the US. The GDP is 17% of the US. Seems pretty comparable to me. Not a perfect comparison, but pretty close, given our similar cultural, political and economic systems.

Anyway, if we receive a superior product in the US, why was my own experience the exact opposite of that? Re-read what I wrote. I personally experienced an emergency life-threatening situation for my son, and I was pretty satisfied with how it was handled.

I have a friend in the US who is a physician, and he told me based on the symptoms I described they most likely would have operated on him in the US, just because of liability issues and it was good business to (I had insurance in the US, and more surgery = more money for hospital). They didn't operate on my son here because the doctor correctly diagnosed that it wasn't appendicitis, so my son wasn't needlessly put under (scary for me to think about), and neither tax payers, insurers nor myself were needlessly billed for a wasteful operation. It's now been several months and no further symptoms have emerged. The English doctor was right.

Now my son probably isn't even categorized under "appendicitis survival rates" here in the UK, because nobody would bother logging what turned out to be a pulled abdominal muscle. Had the operation proceeded in the US, the health care system would pat itself on the back for a Very Successful Appendectomy, letting it notch up their appendicitis survival rates, all at the mere cost of $33,000.

Do you really think I would have been better off personally in the US health care system in this instance? Do you think the US would have better allocated health care dollars and resources than the UK did in this instance? Because I just don't see it.

 

In the US, as I pointed out in my own example, there's a financial incentive to diagnose lots of people for something that isn't there, or might be there but be an exceedingly low probability. So if, say, you excise a completely benign tumor in a breast because there was a 1% likelihood it was cancerous, you could pat yourself on the back for a Very Successful Cancer Surgery when the patient survives.

Or if you are a doctor in England, you can shrug and say, "We kept an eye on it for a year and nothing bad happened, so it wasn't cancer. Nothing to report here."

The US has a 100% survival rate of breast cancer operations in this example. The UK has no evidence either way.

Now pretend there's a severely malignant tumor. In the UK or the US the doctor would operate, and sadly the patient dies. Going just on those two examples, in the UK the overall breast cancer survival rate is 0%, while in the US it's 50%. But it's really the same outcome--one patient lived, and one died.

This is just one of many ways these sort of statistics can be skewed.

 

This is relevant only if Britain's population is about 100% of the U.S. Are you aware their population is not, and is in the neighborhood of 17% of ours? You validated his point without realizing it.

 

Sorry to hear that, Maris. (The first sentence, not the last.)

 

Thank you. I was waiting for someone to figure it out. Our defense spending is actually a smaller percentage of GDP than it should be because of the size of our population. One would expect a certain minimum percentage figure, that declines with economies of scale.

Europe has financed their entire social welfare system on the backs of the US taxpayer.