Scandalous reality of UK NHS unreported in US, US has superior survival rate in all major diseases, breast cancer mortality 88% higher in UK than US-Scott W. Atlas, MD

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7/5/13, "Happy Birthday To Great Britain's Increasingly Scandalous National Health Service," Forbes, Scott W. Atlas, MD

"Despite its much heralded presence in Britain’s health care, the problems of the NHS are severe, notorious, and increasingly scandalous in the most fundamental attributes of any health care system: access and quality.

Waits for care are shocking in the NHS, frequently exposed by British media reports, and long proven by facts, yet they go virtually unreported in the U.S. For instance, in 2010, about one-third of England’s NHS patients deemed ill enough by their GP waited more than one additional month for a specialist appointment. In 2008-2009, the average wait for CABG (coronary artery bypass) in the UK was 57 days. And the impact of this delayed access was obvious. For example, twice as many bypass procedures and four times as many angioplasties are performed in patients needing surgery for heart disease per capita in the U.S. as in the UK.

Another study showed that more UK residents die (per capita) than Americans from heart attack despite the far higher burden of risk factors in Americans for these fatal events. In fact, the heart disease mortality rate in England was 36 percent higher than that in the U.S. Access to medical care is so poor in the NHS that the government was compelled to issue England’s 2010 “NHS Constitution” in which it was declared that no patient should wait beyond 18 weeks for treatment – four months – after GP referral. Defined as acceptable by bureaucrats who set them, such targets propagate the illusion of meeting quality standards despite seriously endangering their citizens, all of whom share an equally poor access to health care. Even given this extraordinarily long leash, the number of patients not being treated within that time soared by 43% to almost 30,000 last January.

BBC subsequently discovered that many patients initially assessed as needing surgery were later re-categorized by the hospital so that they could be removed from waiting lists to distort the already unconscionable delays. Royal College of Surgeons President Norman Williams, calling this “outrageous,” charged that hospitals are cutting their waiting lists by artificially raising thresholds.

Beyond access, the quality of medical care in the NHS, based on data in the medical journals, is unacceptable. Comparing data for cancer, heart disease, and stroke, the most common sources of sickness and death in the U.S. and Europe, and the diseases that generate the highest medical expenditures, we see the overt failure of the NHS and its socialist relatives.

· For cancer, American patients, both men and women, have superior survival rates for all major types. For some specifics, per Verdecchia in Lancet Oncology, the

breast cancer mortality rate is 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom than in the U.S.; prostate cancer mortality rates are strikingly worse in the UK than in the U.S.; mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher than in the U.S."...


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