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Brain -> An inconvenient truth for the GOP: Canada's system is better (2/25/2010 8:00:11 PM)
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Everything you wanted to know about Canadian and American health care.
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Canadians live longer than ever; highest life expectancy in B.C., StatsCan says
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Canadians healthier than Americans, study says
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An inconvenient truth for the GOP: Canada's system is better
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Tue Feb. 23 2010 8:43:15 AM
Canadians live longer than ever; highest life expectancy in B.C., StatsCan says
The Canadian Press
OTTAWA — A new study says Canadians are living longer than ever.
The Statistics Canada study says life expectancy at birth reached 80.7 years for the three-year period between 2005 and 2007.
That's up from the average of 80.5 between 2004 and 2006, and 78.4 a decade earlier.
Gains during the past decade were strongest among men, although women still live the longest.
Men's life expectancy at birth rose 2.9 years to 78.3 in 2005-2007, while among women it increased by 1.8 years to 83.
Provincially, life expectancy at birth in British Columbia was 81.2 years in 2005-2007, highest among the provinces, followed by Ontario at 81 years.
Life expectancy at birth in Quebec was at the national average, while it was below the national average in the rest of the provinces.
The lowest life expectancy was in the three territories combined, at 75.8 years.
Deaths recorded their largest increase since 1993, continuing a long-term upward trend resulting from a growing and aging population.
In 2007, 235,217 people died in Canada, up 7,138 -- or 3.1 per cent -- from 2006.
Both male and female deaths rose, but the increase was slightly larger among women, 3.2 per cent compared with 3.1 for men.
The infant mortality rate rose to 5.1 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in 2007 from five in 2006.
http://www.cp24.com/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20100223/100223_life_expectancy/20100223/?hub=CP24Home
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Canadians healthier than Americans, study says
CTV.ca News Staff
Date: Tue. May. 30 2006 11:31 PM ET
Canadians are healthier and have better access to health care than U.S. residents. And, according to a new study, Canadians obtain better care for half of what Americans spend on their medical system.
"The data is clear and really irrefutable: Canadians are healthier than Americans and they have better access to medical care," Dr. Steffy Woolhandler of the Harvard Medical School said Tuesday. She added that medical care is easier to access for Canadians.
The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, was conducted by Harvard Medical School researchers. They also found that:
Canadians were seven per cent more likely to have a regular doctor
Canadians were 19 per cent less likely than Americans to have their health needs go unmet.
Americans were more than twice as likely to forgo needed medicines because of cost.
Discrepancies in health care become even wider when taking into account income, age, sex, race and immigrant status. In those kind of detailed comparisons, Canadians were 33 per cent more likely to have a regular doctor and 27 per cent less likely to have an unmet health need.
Meanwhile, Americans had higher rates of nearly every serious chronic disease, including obesity, diabetes and chronic lung disease, even though U.S. residents were less likely to be smokers.
"We pay almost twice what Canada does for care, more than $6,000 for every American, yet Canadians are healthier, and live two to three years longer," said Dr. David Himmelstein, an associate professor at Harvard and study co-author.
This first-ever cross-national health survey analyzed data from the Joint Canada/U.S. Survey of Health, with data collected by Statistics Canada and the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics.
It follows a similar study released earlier this month that found white, middle-aged Americans were less healthy than their British counterparts, who spent half as much on health care.
In the latest study, the researchers suggest the biggest barrier to health care in the United States is cost.
More than seven times as many U.S. residents reported going without needed care due to cost, compared to Canadians.
Uninsured U.S. residents were particularly vulnerable, with 30.4 per cent having an unmet health need due to cost, the study reported.
Wait times not a factor in study
CTV's Avis Favaro said the study found Canadians wait, on average, three times more than Americans for medical treatment.
"But when you look at the actual number, it was a little over three per cent waiting for medical treatment, which is a tiny proportion when you look at the big picture, although doctors and patients might disagree with that," she said.
Lead author Dr. Karen Lasser said that, while Canada gets negative press about long wait times for medical procedures, the health system seems to work better.
"No one ever talks about the fact that low-income and minority patients fare better in Canada," said Lasser, a primary care doctor at Cambridge Health Alliance and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. "Based on our findings, if I had to choose between the two systems for my patients, I would choose the Canadian system hands down."
Dr. Raisa Deber of the University of Toronto said the message of the study is that "the sky is not falling."
"The take-home message is: When you compare Canada to the United States, Canada is spending a lot less money to get better results," said Deber, who specializes in health policy, management and evaluation.
"There are small improvement in places that could be fixed and could be made better. But on average the system is working quite well."
The one problem noted in the study: About 21 per cent of Canadian women were not receiving recommended cervical cancer screening.
"However, death rates from cervical cancer have long been lower in Canada than in the United States, presumably reflecting past screening practices and population risk factors," the study said.
The Joint Canada/U.S. Survey of Health surveyed 3,505 Canadians and 5,183 U.S. residents between November 2002 and March 2003.
The study will be published in the July 2006 issue of the American Journal of Public Health
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/an/story/CTVNews/20060530/canada_us_healthcare_060530
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An inconvenient truth for the GOP: Canada's system is better
Republicans want to ensure no public option creeps into the American system
Eugene Lang and Philip DeMont
From Monday's Globe and Mail Published on Friday, Sep. 11, 2009 5:48PM EDT Last updated on Tuesday, Sep. 15, 2009 2:57AM EDT
It is rare for Canada to get noticed in the United States. In fact, it is almost unprecedented for anything Canadian to be the focal point of debate in Washington. Yet we have seen just that in recent months during the congressional wrangling over U.S. President Barack Obama's attempts to reform health insurance.
Canada's medicare system has suddenly been thrust into the spotlight south of the border. It has been pilloried by the Republicans in Congress, the subject of derisive and distorted television advertisements, described variously as a system of medicine by bureaucrat, a statist form of health care afflicted by gross inequities and inefficiencies, one that pales in comparison to the U.S. model. The hysterical tone of the anti-medicare rhetoric among
Republicans would make one think Canada is North Korea.
But there is an inconvenient truth that the Republican ideology cannot dispute. Canada's approach to providing citizens with universal health insurance is superior to the U.S. model of private insurance. When we get beyond the anti-medicare ideology and histrionics on Capitol Hill, we can establish this by reference to four basic numbers that give a good sense of our system versus the system in the United States.
Life expectancy is a basic measure of the quality of health care. In the U.S., a citizen will live 77.8 years on average. In Canada, you can expect to live two and a half years longer (80.4 years). Infant mortality is also a vital indicator of health care. In the United States, 6.37 infants die out of every 1,000. In Canada the number is 5.4 out of a 1,000.
But what about the cost differences of the two approaches to health care? Surely our Leviathan-like system, which produces such enviable results, must cost a fortune relative to the U.S. model.
The best measure of health care costs is the percentage a country spends relative to the size of its economy, or its gross domestic product (GDP). Canadians spend about 10 per cent of GDP on health. Americans spend 16 per cent to achieve inferior results on life expectancy and infant mortality.
Finally, it is estimated that there are somewhere around 40 million Americans – about 12 per cent of their population, well in excess of the total population of Canada – who have no medical insurance whatsoever. These unfortunate people are literally on their own in paying for any and all medical treatments they require. That gap in coverage is staggering, making the United States an outlier among all advanced Western nations.
One might ask how many uninsured citizens exist in Canada? The answer is zero – all Canadians are insured. In this country, good-quality, universally accessible medical care is regarded as a basic element of citizenship, kind of like owning a gun is in the U.S.
So to sum up. We live longer than the Americans do. We are less likely to die at or soon after birth than the Americans are. All Canadians have medical insurance, whereas a huge number of Americans don't. And we pay less as a society for health care than they do in the United States. Four numbers paint a stark picture. And when you strip away the anti-medicare ideological rants and falsehoods on display in Washington, Canada's approach to health insurance would probably sound pretty good to many Americans.
To their credit, by putting public insurance on the table as a supplement to private plans, the Democrats in the U.S. Congress are trying to drag the United States into the club of civilized nations when it comes to health care. We've been in that club since the establishment of medicare more than 40 years ago.
5Don't get us wrong here. We are not saying medicare is perfect; it is far from that, and it requires constant improvement, as most Canadians understand. But it is not a bad deal for citizens of this country.
The Republican-led anti-medicare lobby in Congress knows these numbers and facts. But they are regarded as inconvenient truths that must be ignored in the crusade to discredit the Canadian approach to health insurance, to ensure no public option creeps into the U.S. system. Anti-government ideology is running amok in Washington, trumping facts and rational debate, distorting one of the most important public policy issues the United States has grappled with in decades.
Ultimately, the U.S. public will pay the price for that.
Eugene Lang is a former senior economist at Finance Canada. Philip DeMont served as a senior policy adviser to Ontario's health minister.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/an-inconvenient-truth-for-the-gop-canadas-system-is-better/article1284869/
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