Dr. Douglass has his quirks. Frankly, I find his stand on public vaccination to be somewhat nutty. But when you dig beneath the hucksterism that earns him his living, you find a stalwart libertarian. I don't know if that's rare in the medical community, but it's the first time I've been thusly entertained in reading ABOUT medicine.
Anyway, Dr. Douglass' latest has to do with a "study" that found Americans more at risk for death due to "treatable conditions" than the citizens of any other developed nation. Evidently, a condition is "treatable" only when it occurs within the context of socialized medicine.
That's a risk I can live with.
People love to take shots at the healthcare system in the U.S. Usually, it's democratic U.S. politicians and loud-mouthed celebrities like Michael Moore who do most of the bashing. And I'm sure the usual suspects will be excited to hear about this latest item that I've just come across. According to a new study, more people die from "treatable conditions" in the United States than in any other "leading" industrialized nation.
The study, according to researchers writing in the journal Health Affairs, ranked the U.S. last out of 19 other industrial nations. The best? France, Japan, and Australia. The researchers claim that if the U.S. healthcare system performed as well as those of the top three countries in the rankings, there would be 101,000 fewer deaths in the U.S. per year.
Talk about specious logic. You can argue until you're blue-in-the-face against the way that healthcare is managed or mismanaged in this country – and I'm likely to agree with you on many points. But to ascribe phantom body counts to "the system" is crossing the line. Get ready to hear the so-called research techniques that helped these folks draw this absurd conclusion.
The research – if it even deserves to be called such – was conducted by Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee from the London School of Hygene and Tropical Medicine. The pair tracked deaths that they deemed "could have been prevented by access to timely and effective healthcare." They then ranked nations based on the results.
There's so much wrong with this study that I don't know where to start. Apparently, they established their rankings by considering deaths before age 75 from numerous causes, including heart disease, stroke, certain cancers, diabetes, certain bacterial infections and complications of common surgical procedures. Let me tell you this as a doctor – the individual case histories and circumstances behind nearly every one of these "preventable deaths" can be so widely varied that it would be impossible to make the blanket statement that a large, statistical number of these cases could be determined to be preventable.
But the most revealing comment from Nolte and McKee has nothing to do with their shoddy and grossly speculative conclusions.
Nolte showed their true colors when she said "the large number of Americans who lack health insurance probably was a key factor in the nation's poor showing in the rankings."
Ah ha!
Even more revealing was a little fact that was buried at the bottom of the article by the sympathetic journalist who wrote the piece: "The research was backed by the Commonwealth Fund, a private, New York-based health policy foundation.
Double ah ha!
Just a few clicks of the keyboard, and the Internet whisked me away to the website of the Commonwealth Fund, who describe themselves as "a private, charitable foundation that aims to promote a high performing health care system that achieves better access, improved quality, and greater efficiency, particularly for society's most vulnerable populations. These populations include low-income, uninsured, ethnic minorities, young children, and elderly adults."
In other words, they're a political action committee that's pushing a socialized healthcare agenda!
It's no wonder that Nolte and McKee used such shoddy research: They likely knew the results before their research even began!
Always, always, always follow the money. And when you find the money, you always find the motivation and the agenda. It burns me that a politically motivated organization can so blatantly back research and then publish that research as though it was done in some independent manner – and that the press will uncritically gobble it up and spew it back out as though it came from a burning bush.
I've written on more than one occasion about the wrong-headedness of the concept of socialized medicine. I don't know of anything that's been made more efficient by having the government run it. I find it hilarious that they're attempting to use this slipshod research to prove their point—and that they can conclude that lack of healthcare means zero access to health facilities in the case of cancer, stroke, heart disease, etc. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The fact is, hospitals aren't allowed to turn away anyone who steps foot into the emergency department…because it's against the law. The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1985 says that hospitals aren't allowed to turn anyone away, whether they're insured or not. The government doesn't pay for such acts of mercy, either—the hospitals do. Which is exactly why dozens of hospitals (mainly in California) are being forced out of business.
Quite simply, what these researchers are trying to pass off as fact is actually a politically motivated lie. And here in 2008 – an election year – you'd best be ready to hear a lot of those.