Canadians healthier than Americans: study

Canadians healthier than Americans: study

Source: URL: http://english.pravda.ru/society/81364-health-0

You can add Canadians to the list of foreigners who are healthier than Americans. Americans are 42 percent more likely than Canadians to have diabetes, 32 percent more likely to have high blood pressure, and 12 percent more likely to have arthritis, Harvard Medical School researchers found. That is according to a survey in which American and Canadian adults were asked over the telephone about their health.

The study comes less than a month after other researchers reported that middle-aged, white Americans are much sicker than their counterparts in England.

"We're really falling behind other nations," said Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a co-author of the Canadian study, reports Washingtonpost.

According to Forbes, Americans said they were more satisfied than Canadians with the quality of care they received at either a hospital or a community-based facility. Canadians were happier with their physicians, however.

As well, American health care did excel in some areas compared to the Canadian system. For example, American women were more likely to have had a Pap smear and a mammogram than their Canadian counterparts.

Nevertheless, the American health system appears weakest in relation to the Canadian approach when it comes to caring for the uninsured.

"These findings raise serious questions about what we're getting for the $2.1 trillion we're spending on health care this year," said Dr. David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard.

"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," Himmelstein added in a statement.
"Canadians had better access to most types of medical care (with the single exception of pap smears)," Himmelstein and colleagues wrote in the study, published in the American Journal of Public Health.

"Canadians were 7 percent more likely to have a regular doctor and 19 percent less likely to have an unmet health need. U.S. respondents were almost twice as likely to go without a needed medicine due to cost (9.9 percent of U.S. respondents couldn't afford medicine versus 5.1 percent in Canada)," they added, informs Reuters.



June 1, 2006Low Payments by U.S. Raise Medical Bills Billions a Year

By MILT FREUDENHEIM

Employers and consumers are paying billions of dollars more a year for medical care to compensate for imbalances in the nation's health care system resulting from tight Medicare and Medicaid budgets, according to Blue Cross officials and independent actuaries.

A new study commissioned by Premera Blue Cross, based in Seattle, has found a rapid acceleration in higher costs to private payers in Washington State, for example, as hospitals and doctors grapple with constraints in the federal health insurance programs.

The study found that in 2004, the most recent year for which full data are available, hospitals in Washington State charged an additional $738 million — or 14.3 percent of their revenue — to private payers to make up for Medicare and Medicaid underpayments. Similarly, doctors shifted $620 million, or 12 percent, said John Pickering, an actuary at Milliman Inc., a consulting and actuarial firm that conducted the study.

A similar Milliman study in California for 2004 said that health plans and consumers paid an additional $4.5 billion for hospital care in that state to compensate for Medicaid and Medicare constraints. Milliman's California study, commissioned by Blue Shield of California, did not include physicians' charges.

Will Fox, a Milliman actuary, said California hospitals had been hit particularly hard by Medicare payment policies in the last few years, "and there is no reason to think this has let up."

Other research has come to similar conclusions across the country. Unpaid hospital bills, largely for the uninsured, are costing about $45 billion nationally a year and adding about 8.5 percent to the cost of health insurance for those who do pay, said Kenneth E. Thorpe, a health care economist at Emory University.

Employers said the rising cost trends were, in turn, adding to the growing numbers of people without insurance. And when those people check into hospitals, they generate even higher costs for those employers and consumers who pay insurance premiums.
"This is a serious national problem, and it is only going to get much worse," said Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health, a research and trade group for large employers. "There are more uninsured, the hospitals are inefficient, and every year, Medicare and Medicaid hold down on increases to cover rising medical costs," she said.

Rich Maturi, a senior vice president of Premera, said the report would show "employers and policy makers that they needed to address an unsustainable trend in the growth of cost-shifting." Business leaders, health plans and groups representing hospitals and doctors plan to meet in July to review the report and make policy recommendations.

Although many state budgets are overwhelmed by rising Medicaid costs, health care reforms intended to reduce the ranks of the uninsured that were recently enacted in Massachusetts and Vermont include more state money for Medicaid. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Partners Healthcare, the largest hospital group in Boston, jointly supported the Medicaid increases.

"That was a real-world example of hospitals and insurers seeing that the had common interests," said Paul Ginsberg, a health economist who is president of the Center for Studying Health Systems Change, a nonprofit research group in Washington.

Hospitals across the country lost money on Medicare patients in 2003 after at least six years of declining profit margins, according to the latest report by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, which advises Congress and federal officials.