Reply to Is the US health system collapsing?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Is it really good anywhere?

Last week there were big complaints in the UK about the NHS computer system that led to unfavorable health outcomes and deaths.

My friend couldn't find a PCP in Toronto for months.

Other countries are losing doctors to higher paying countries  and don't produce enough specialists. People wait years for joint surgery, or months for oncology appointments.

How much of this is because medical science can do more so demand is higher for an increased number of treatments.[/quote]

I don’t buy about medical science doing more because life expectancy is not impressive in the USA.
If I have to guess Scandinavian countries might be doing better.[/quote]

Of course they’re doing more. In 1986, there were 9,000 kidney transplants in the US. In 2022, there were over 22,000.[/quote]

That's a 6% increase year over year, which is not that impressive. There are currently over 100,000 people waiting for a kidney transplant in the US. [/quote]

The relevance is that the population has increased 39% in that period whereas the number of surgeries has increased 144%. That’s just for kidney transplants. There are now 1.3 million knee and hip replacements per year in the US.

The ageing of the population plus demand for procedures which once did not exist means that the healthcare systems of many countries are under strain. In reality, there is already rationing of these services. In the US, I guess it’s those with the most money or best insurance who are at the front of the line. [b]In countries with socialised medicine, it’s those on the waitlist the longest [/b]although there are tend to be funding inequities across different regions and naturally there are queue jumpers who can afford the private route. [/quote]

I can only speak of France since that is the country that I am most familiar with. They have a score system to match kidney donors and recipients which takes into account biological factors in matching, age pairing and road distance between sampling and transplant. By contrast, the US has an antiquated and inefficient method of matching donors and recipients. [/quote]

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