Wednesday, August 12, 2009

The Theory Of Everything

Via Yggy, The Guardian's Hugh Muir reminds the world that the UK's National Health Service has magically failed to slaughter millions of Brits, despite the warnings of GOP nutjobs about the Obama health care reform initiative:
The danger, says the Investor's Business Daily, is that he borrows too much from the UK. "The controlling of medical costs in countries such as Britain through rationing, and the health consequences thereof, are legendary. The stories of people dying on a waiting list or being denied altogether read like a horror script … People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless." We say his life is far from worthless, as they do at Addenbrooke's hospital, Cambridge, where Professor Hawking, who has motor neurone disease, was treated for chest problems in April. As indeed does he. "I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS," he told us. "I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived." Something here is worthless. And it's not him.
The IBD research department needs an overhaul, methinks. Despite the fact that Dr. Hawking is in fact British and grew up in the UK, he somehow slipped through the fingers of the British death panels and went on to become one of the world's foremost theoretical physicists. This would seemingly counter the claim that he "wouldn't have had a chance in the UK."

Go figure. As one of David Kurtz's readers at TPM notes:
Perhaps there will be some brave Republican willing to spearhead an investigation of whether Stephen Hawking actually IS British? Isn't it awfully convenient that a man with no discernable British accent suddenly claims that he is British just after it's pointed out the the UK health system would have euthanized him as a child? Where is his birth certificate?
Doesn't take a world-class scientist to do a little background work, guys.

The best part? IBD's "correction" simply omits the Hawking reference altogether, and still goes on screaming about Britain's death panels coming for your grandmother.

13 comments:

Servius said...

The survival rate for breast cancer in the United States is 84%; in Britain, it’s 69%.

The survival rate for prostate cancer in the United States is 92%; it’s only 51% in Great Britain.

Zandar said...

Sure. If you can afford the cancer treatments, that is.

Servius said...

Actually that rate is a survival rate for those who get cancer, not those who can pay for cancer treatments.

Zandar said...

If you can't pay for the treatments Serv, the survival rate drops to 0%, now doesn't it?

Servius said...

So why is the rate so much lower in GB where they pay for it?

Denzil said...

Like all those who're pumping these "facts" to compare the UK and US health services right now, Servius is shamelessly oversimplifying the complexity of the processes and measurement metrics involved.

This Kos diary does a great job of giving a more sensible overview, not least by making the point that life span after diagnosis depends on how early the disease is detected:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/8/12/75813/2178

As it observes:

"In the United States, there has been a big emphasis since the early 1990s on early screening through PSA (prostate-specific antigen) testing. Five-year survivability rates have increased simply because men are being diagnosed with prostate cancer at a very preliminary stage of a slow-developing disease. If you are diagnosed early on, your chances of surviving for another five years are close to 100 percent. Britain is several years behind the United States in the widespread use of PSA testing."

The diary suggests this as a more informative comparison, which doesn't even take into account the relative expense of the various healthcare systems, nationally or personally:

"The following numbers come from an OECD comparison of mortality rates due to cancer in 2000. We are comparing apples to apples here, guys, and look at the result:

1 Netherlands: 433 deaths per 100,000 people
2 Italy: 418 deaths per 100,000 people
3 Hungary: 411 deaths per 100,000 people
4 Luxembourg: 409.7 deaths per 100,000 people
5 Slovakia: 405.3 deaths per 100,000 people
6 Ireland: 357.6 deaths per 100,000 people
7 Czech Republic: 335.4 deaths per 100,000 people
8 New Zealand: 327.3 deaths per 100,000 people
9 United States: 321.9 deaths per 100,000 people
10 Australia: 298.9 deaths per 100,000 people
11 Norway: 289.4 deaths per 100,000 people
12 France: 286.1 deaths per 100,000 people
13 Austria: 280 deaths per 100,000 people
14 Sweden: 268.2 deaths per 100,000 people
15 Finland: 255.4 deaths per 100,000 people
16 United Kingdom: 253.5 deaths per 100,000 people

The UK actually has the lowest mortality rate of the sixteen countries listed! The US falls in the middle of the pack, with almost 70 more deaths per 100,000 than the UK."

Which is pretty irrelevant anyway, since NOBODY IS IN THEIR WILDEST DREAMS SUGGESTING THAT THE US ADOPT A SYSTEM ORGANIZED ALONG THE LINES OF THE UK'S NHS! (Excuse caps, but this nonsense has gone on long enough, and isn't getting the stupid debate anywhere.)

Servius said...

So the best you can say is that in our relatively free market system we catch the disease earlier so we have better success at curing it.

Denzil said...

Nope. Less than 10 minutes is obviously too short a time for you to read and absorb the information offered.

Prostate cancer is generally a slow-developing disease. The "statistics" you cite give no survival timescale, so they're meaningless. Everybody dies sometime, huh?

Since the PSA test is sensitive enough to detect very early-onset prostate cancer, then survival to five years is less than remarkable, precisely because it's a slow-developing disease. The statistics you cited are meaningless, not least because they offer no timescale.

And as I pointed out, who in the name of heck imagines that the US is going to adopt the UK NHS as a model? It's a strawman argument taken to extremes.

Servius said...

The goal of the current plans before Congress are to drive us toward a single payer plan so the comparison seems apt.

When you go looking for the reports you'll find that those are recurrence free survival rates.

Denzil said...

Since you've changed the subject, I'll assume you concede those points made above.

There are many, many mixed private/public health systems out there, such as Canada's or France's, which adopt a different model than the UK's NHS and are much more likely to resemble anything that may develop in the US, so I fail to see the reason for the fixation on the comparisons you're drawing, especially when they're founded on such vague and unsubstantiated data - unless you're just uncritically parroting what you get from #tcot or wherever.

"When you go looking for the reports you'll find that those are recurrence free survival rates."

Why do I need to go looking for them? You seem to have set yourself the task of making a case, so make it. Supply references, if you please.

Servius said...

I was wrong. It's relative survival rate which means, "A measure of net survival that is calculated by comparing observed (overall) survival with expected survival from a comparable set of people that do not have cancer to measure the excess mortality that is associated with a cancer diagnosis."

Here's the report for the US. http://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2005/results_merged/sect_23_prostate.pdf

Here's the definitions of survival.
http://seer.cancer.gov/cgi-bin/glossary/glossary.pl#36

Denzil said...

I think we can cut this boring process a little shorter by your going along to Nate Silver's pad, where the reason why comparing the UK system - no matter what statistical twists you choose to bring into the discussion - to what is likely to form the new American system is nonsensical will become a little clearer or you: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/08/not-all-socialist-countries-are-alike.html

Servius said...

clever. Fact remains that in our relatively free market system which you guys want to effectively dismantle people get tested for prostate cancer earlier and more often leading to better survival rates.

This does not prove that it's because of our relatively free market system (RFMS) but it's not a point in the NHS favor.

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