Nobby wrote:
Yeah. America's better because they treat a condition that affects a statistically insignificant proportion of aptients who can afford to pay better than UK.
No. America's system is "different" in that by primarily requiring "the people" to pay for their own medical care, while costing more "per-person", it ensures that the processes needed to advance medicine are there are well, meaning that our system has the ability to provide care for medical conditions that can't be treated (or not treated well) in socialized systems.
It's patently unfair to compare the per-person cost of the entire medical system in two countries, when one country is simply providing the most cost efficient system to the majority of the people, while the other includes research into new (and very expensive) medical technology that pushes the boundary of medical science. You're picking a comparison that favors your system while attempting to make an argument that yours is better than ours.
A common feature of socialized systems is that a minority pull most of the weight for everyone. And this is no different in the medical system. As a citizen of a nation that has a socialized medical system the last thing you should be arguing for is the US to adopt the same. Where do you think the bulk of the medical research is done Nobby? Who foots the bill? Your system works and is able to advance over time because our system spends the extra cash to do the most expensive parts of new research. If we adopted the same system as you guys have, new techniques and technology growth in that field would slow to a crawl.
Your system works because we don't use it. In exactly the same way your economic system works because we don't use it. Exactly how many UK dollars were involved in developing things like home computers, DVDs, cell phones, and the internet? Oh. That would be almost zero...
You have those things because we *don't* use a system that focuses on providing the most efficient care and service available today to our people. Your system only works because someone else is out there (us) carrying the load. If the entire world adopts your system, we'll stagnate.
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The fact that the tens of millions of Asthmatics, Diabetics, people with AF, CHD, COPD and depressive conditions have their medication funded by the populace in UK while yanks die young for lack of cash is just a political moot point, no?
And how much of the research done in those areas to develop the treatments and medicines that you cheaply and efficiently hand out to your population today came from the UK medical system Nobby? How much of that counts in the "per-person" cost? What treatments would you be providing to them if someone else didn't foot the bill for the research?
It's like the slacker telling the guy who's working hard how much better it is to be a slacker... Funny!
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As for the specifics of AVM, embolisation has (I just checked) an average 2 week wait in my region, while Gamma Knife surgery has negligible waits.
2 week wait from when? After the patient has died from lack of diagnosis?
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And either way, a diagnosis of AVM means you're fUcked, so your argument really is so random as to be a joke.
In the UK, yes. Because it's almost a statistical certainty that it wont be diagnosed until it's burst. In the US? Not so much. As I pointed out, I personally know a 38 year old woman who was diagnosed at age 16 with a very large AVM. She's literally alive today because the medical technology advanced from just being able to treat it with drugs and hope it didn't burst to the very embolization and gamma knife treatments you mention. She was one of the earliest patients to receive those treatments in fact. During her lifetime she's gone from a diagnosis of essentially "You're fu
cked" (don't ever drink, don't ever get too stressed, don't ride amusements park rides other than the kiddie ones, and you've got about a 1% chance of surviving a pregnancy) to sealing off most of the AVM, sufficient that she could (with risk) have a child, then as newer embolization techniques appeared (mostly involving smaller tubing that could reach closer in) they were able to seal off yet more, then gamma knife procedures to kill off the cells still remaining.
She is right now waiting the results of her latest angiogram to see if the remaining tiny risk of bleed might have been eliminated for good. She's already at a state where her risks are almost as low as any other random person out there, and they're talking about taking her off the medication she's been on for the last 22 years of her life. If she'd been in your medical system... well... you said what would happen.
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In some cases, picking a 'rare' condition can highlight anomalies. In this one, you aimed, fired and lost a toe.
No. I hit the target. You just said that you'd be screwed with that diagnoses, but that's clearly not the case (in the US). Um... And she was diagnosed 22 years ago Nobby. If people are screwed in the UK *today* with that diagnosis, what do you think the survival rate was for someone diagnosed 22 years ago? Zero? Yeah. Close to it.
Edited, Sep 15th 2008 4:31pm by gbaji
