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Americans Are Seriously Sick
jd writes "A study by US and British researchers on frequency of illnesses shows that even when you compare like groups in the US and the UK, people in the US are considerably sicker than their counterparts in the UK. This is after factors such as age, race, income, education and gender were taken into consideration. The most startling conclusion was that although the richest Americans were better off than the poorest Americans, they did no better (health-wise) than the poorest of the English. Previous studies of the entire population had shown similar results, with America placing around 25th amongst industrialized countries on chronic disease prevention, but it had been assumed that minorities and economics were skewing the results. This study suggests that maybe that isn't the case."
No doubt many other people are going to write in talking about "fat americans" being the problem - and its true that nutrition in America is a serious problem, but the comparison is to England, so not the cause of the differences.
Personally, I work on average 8 months a year and spend the rest of the time travelling - I am rarely stressed and almost never sick.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
So who ate all the pies?
Socialism == Medical
US != Socialism
HENCE
Medical != US
Sheesh.. when we'll we learn?
Whereas Canadians are "x-treme", and the French are "to the max"
cmd-q.co.uk - some sort of stupid fucking internet bullshit
I believe health care is a right, not a privilege for the rich, and I'm proud to pay my taxes towards the NHS that provides top notch treatment to EVERYBODY.
I'm guessing you're one of the lucky ones with private health insurance. Try living on the povery line and making a choice between getting that lump looked at or eating for a month. I know what most people are forced to choose in your so called land of the free...
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
...but, working in the healthcare profession in the US, no one gets paid unless you're sick. Sadly, healthcare here is definitely for-profit. So of course we're all 'sick.'
(Not a supporter of socialist programs in general, but healthcare is too important to be trusted to human greed.)
Michael Moore is going to expose the rotten health care system in the USA in his new movie called Sicko:h p?id=193
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.p
The health insurance industry is a parasite the purpose of which is to interfere with your patient-doctor relationship and to deny your treatment.
Maybe it's because of the fast food? I live in England and I eat pretty much entirely home cooked and prepared meals, except maybe apart from the odd sandwich from Sainsbury's.
I recently went out to stay at a friends house for a weekend, and on the first day we ate McDonalds in the evening. The next day I was feeling pretty sick. All I ate about two burgers and some chicken nuggets.
Let me quote this from the BBC article:
Rates of smoking are similar in the US and England but alcohol consumption is higher in the UK.
There you have it, folks, DRINK!
(I am only half joking)
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
The official nationality of people from the UK is British, not English. By referring to Brits as "English", you're pissing off a sizable number of people who are proud to be Scottish, Irish, Welsh, etc. Us English did some pretty nasty things to them in the past, so calling them "English" isn't exactly going to ingratiate yourself with them.
By referring to people from the UK as British, you're still going to piss off some Irish, but at least you're correct in your terminology. Yes, British is the correct term to use for somebody from the UK, even if they aren't from Great Britain. References:
Having read the article, I have no clue exactly which region of the world it is talking about, because it seems to use different regions as synonyms. It could be the UK, which is a country and member nation of the UN. It could be Great Britain, which is a geographical region within the UK comprised mainly of England, Wales and Scotland. Or it could be England, which is a region, home nation and constituent country of the UK, but which doesn't have its own government.
If I had to guess, I'd say that they were talking about the UK, even though they don't use the word "UK" at all, instead opting for "British" and "England". I base this guess on years of experience with peopel from the USA getting it wrong and the sentence "Those dismal results are despite the fact that U.S. health care spending is double what England spends on each of its citizens." Hint: England spends nothing whatsoever on its citizens. The NHS in England is run by the UK government. It's the NHS in other parts of the UK that belong to their respective constituent countries - England actually has very little to call its own these days.
England, Great Britain and the UK are three completely different things. Mix them up, and you piss people off. It's a bit like mixing up California with the USA with North America. You'd think somebody was pretty ignorant to do that, right?
According to TFA coverage isn't the issue here. The purpose of the study was to compare health across the board, not just of the working class or poor (who would benefit from a universal healthcare system) and it found that regardless of income Americans were less healthy than UKers. Which is bizarre, considering we (the US) are still the richest country in the world, and should therefore have the best top tier healthcare.. or at least one would think.
At any rate, as cool as universal healthcare would be, TFA really isn't bringing that issue up. Rather, I think it alludes to the hire levels of stress or maybe more generally the unhealthy ways we Americans live. Universal Healthcare can't make you sleep 8 hours every night or eat all your vegetables, and I think that's really the point that should be driven home by the article... as Americans, we just aren't living healthily (and no amount of healthcare can make up for that.)
Because we decided as a nation that it should be a right that want to grant to our fellows - and I'm very proud of this fact.
Averege expected life spans for the US and the UK are nearly identical, and the average expected life span for non-hispanic white Americans is considrerably better than the UK average. So what does this study mean?
(1) Being more sick more often won't actually make a difference to how long you can expect to live? Sounds implausible.
(2) Americans get sick more often but their health care is better so they live just as long or longer? Sounds more plausible, although it seems like too much of a coincidence that better healthcare is almost exactly balancing worse health.
(3) Maybe better access to health care in the US results in a higher rate of diagnosis, rather than a higher rate of illness? That would explain the nearly identical lifespan, but only if the better access to healthcare makes little difference to lifespan.
(4) A difference in medical culture, where doctors in the US are more likely to diagnose and attempt to treat problems that doctors in the UK would just tell their patients to live with? I know that psychiatrists and psychologists in the US are very quick to diagnose and prescribe drugs compared to Japan or New Zealand (the other two countries that I am familiar with). Maybe there is something similar going on with the medical profession in general.
Spot on, poster. One point you missed though: despite the long hours and few vacation days in the US, there are more Americans in poverty now in real terms than at any time since the Great Depression. For tens of millions of Americans, despite all the work they are still dirt poor. This is for several reasons:
- Minimum wage is not tied to any meaningful cost of living index.
- The official 'Poverty Line' is similarly not based on any meaningful cost of living index (it is uselessly taken as 3 times the cost of food; food is dramatically cheaper now than even 25 years ago, and much less healthy, so this metric is positively retarded).
- Rent on property has gone sky high as the economy has grown, meaning the cost of even the crappiest housing is essentially unaffordable for a minimum wage worker.
And lastly, Employers are becoming increasingly exploitative, harkening back to 19th Century labor practices. Labor is less organized now and unions are weaker (where is a Wal Mart workers union for their 900,000 employees?). With so-called 'unskilled' jobs, employers encourage high turnover so they don't have to give pay increases with all sorts of draconian practices.
On this last point, culpability falls largely on the government. Without regulation, unbridled capitalism is taken America steadily in the direction of Asian sweatshops. Supply and demand in the labor market defies all textbook economic logic because workers have no time to shop around for the best jobs, or to switch jobs when a better one becomes available and because they have no access to information about what other jobs might be available. Sure, you might get a dollar an hour more somewhere else, but if they withhold the first weeks' pay there, you can never switch because you won't ever be able to pay the rent or buy food if you miss a week's wages. Millions of people are that close to the edge. And so without rules - without government regulation - keeping companies from fucking low-wage workers, guess what? Those workers get fucked.
So the point you missed is that millions of Americans are in a state of profound poverty. Sure, the US has pretty good general public infrastructure - roads, water, electricity - so it doesn't seem like poor people are living in the same poverty and desperation that exists in places like India, but in many instances they are. The toll on a person's health from the stress of poverty alone probably outweighs the toll of long working hours and few vacations. Bill Gates works 80-hour weeks, so I hear. He probably doesn't have the kind of stress-related health problems that a single mother holding down two jobs has, even if she only works a 60 hour week.
Be sure to read Nickel and Dimed for more information about the impossibility of surviving in America on minimum wage.
A-Bomb
American employee: Hello Boss, I can't come into work today. I'm seriously sick.
American employer: Oh, how sick?
American employee: Well, I'm in bed with my sister.
Get your own free personal location tracker
I was reading this report on the BBC website earlier today, and I thought then that there is always the possibility that there is a flaw in the study method itself. As the study looks at self-reported health issues, you could also draw the conclusion that people in the US are more aware of health problems than the British.
I'm British and I haven't been to the doctors in about five years. I know several people who aren't even registered with doctors. No-one I know of my age (36) has had tests for prostate cancer, checked themselves for testicular cancer or even has regular annual check-ups.
There's a possibility, IMHO, that relying on self-reporting of illness would produce this kind of result in the older generation of Brits, as they're still following the "just get on with life and don't bother the doctors" mentality of those who grew up in the aftermath of WWII.
My mother had a lot of pain in her lower back for years - when I eventually persuaded her to go to the doctors he got her to go to hospital. They did a scan of her lower back - nothing wrong with it - but noticed something wrong with one of her kidneys (it had never grown from when she was a child). So they took another scan higher up to have a better look at that. Then noticed something wrong with her liver. So they took another scan higher up and saw that she had severe cancer of the liver (despite her being a non-smoker and a very light drinker). She died about 6 weeks later.
She would never have thought of getting either her kidneys or her liver checked out. If she had then maybe she would still be alive. But, like so many people from her (and her parents) generation going to the doctor was only something you avoided as you didn't like to bother him/her.
As usual, your views may vary.
--
silas
The fact that we democratically decided that it should be.
The fact that it's basic human decency to help those less fortunate than yourself, particularly those in potentially dire need.
The fact that when a single life is needlessly cut short, the whole society is affected in some way.
Failing all that, simple enlightened self interest. Even if you can afford to pay for your healthcare or insurance now, can you be sure of that in the future? Heaven help you if you fall on hard times, or require treatment that your insurance won't cover.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
The truth is, there are only two markets in the US that consistently see greater than inflation price increases: medicine and education. Please note both markets are broken by government action.
The US government-run health care institutions and programs are the most efficient in the nation, handily beating private health care systems in terms of cost, overhead, and at least equalling it in quality. And I believe if you looked into it, you'd find the same for education. Both health care and education have been broken by the market.
I'm sorry, Adam Smith's invisible hand works almost everywhere, and frequently when it doesn't, it's failure is because of government, not big business
Adam Smith's invisible hand has a long list of preconditions to work, preconditions on the numbers and sizes of competitors, on information available to competitors and buyers, on the kinds of goods being exchanged, etc. Claiming that it "works almost everywhere" is just completely wrong and demonstrates an utter unfamiliarity with economic principles.
For health care and education, several of the preconditions are violated and therefore a free market approach doesn't work; the current failures of the US health care and educational system are a direct consequence of that (however, aspects of both health care and education can be left to the market--it just requires careful planning and design).
The free market works wonderfully when its preconditions are satisfied. It's the purpose of our government to ensure that free markets exist in as many goods and services as possible. It is also the purpose of our government to ensure that the small subset of goods and services the free market cannot supply efficiently are provided in some other way.
People like you, who have an irrational and factually wrong belief in the universal applicability of free market economics are at the source of a lot of our economic ills. It's adding insult to injury that after wrecking our health care and educational systems, you then turn around and blame the government for the mess you made through deregulation and privatization.
You're right, but for different reasons -- the twisted economics of private health care in the U.S. are such that insurance companies run like hell away from anyone who is sick.
When you see health plans marketed here in the States, it's done by showing healthy, happy people, not showing sick people receiving good health care. That's because insurers want to recruit customers who are in good health and leave those with diabetes or other chronic conditions for some other company. It's like a game of hot potato: who gets stuck with all of the diabetics and their lifelong health problems?
As for health care being a societal issue, that's right on. Some people can take action to be healthy and remain that way, and others may take action but still wind up getting heart disease or diabetes because of family history, etc. The people who live healthy lives and stay healthy, as well as the people who live less healthy lifestyles but still wind up not getting diseases -- these are the people who "pay" for the people unfortunate enough to get sick. The healthy peoples' low costs subsidize the costs of those who wind up getting sick. In a nationalized health care system, those costs are spread out over the entire society, and it's a wash overall.
In a private system, it's in the interests of insurers to seek out only the people who don't get sick -- also known as people without pre-existing conditions (those who haven't already been sick). Those with pre-existing conditions (diabetics) or those at risk for health problems (smokers, older people, etc.) are passed up, or charged far higher premiums, essentially locking them out of health care coverage if they aren't covered through their employer.
Here's an interesting factor that would be very, very difficult to isolate, but that may be having an effect on health in the U.S. vs. the U.K. -- how many Americans are staying in stressful, underpaid, overworked jobs because they don't want to lose their health coverage? Seriously, that's one of the top priorities for basically anyone here, whether they can keep their health coverage or not. If big employers like General Motors or Ford or Boeing start to phase out health coverage because of the cost it adds to their products, it's going to start to get even worse for us.
Not that it isn't already bad -- this is National Cover the Uninsured Week here, which is a good time to remind everyone of the following:
* There are 46 million people in the U.S. without insurance (about 20 percent of the population).
* The country spends more than 20 percent of its GDP on health expenditures.
* We spend more per person on health care than most industrialized nations, and despite our "top of the line" care and technology, we have significantly lower indicators or health than most of those nations.
* Hospitals (emergency rooms in particular) that provide charity care are becoming the first point of contact for many people who are uninsured, which is making it hard for some hospitals to stay financially solvent.
It's not at all an exaggeration to say our health care system is in a crisis right now.