The NHS & the United States of America

[FlashLackey]

See that's one of the problems in the arguments you try to use.
Overall quality of care for everyone cannot be judged by the quality care that only the wealthiest can afford, just as the overall quality of health of the population cannot be judged strictly on the basis of one or two narrow types of cancer while completely ignoring every other factor and health problem.

Yes. Overall quality provided by a system can't be judged by what only the wealthy have. But, it can be judged by the over-all performance. And I have provided evidence demonstrating that it is comparatively high, over-all in the US. You have not shown anything to the contrary.

It was three cancers studied, chosen because they are some of the most common cancers that people get. The performance of our system when dealing with those cancers is a good indication of general quality because it's not plausible that any system would have any reason to focus on and do well with three very common diseases at the expense of others.

If you think that there are other illnesses that Americans get that our system performs relatively badly at treating, go ahead and show the evidence.

The major reason we don't have true competition in the industry is because that's the way the insurance companies have used their influence to write the laws.
They don't want competition.
They are the ones that create monopolies by spending billions buying legislation that allows them to takeover or force out any competition

I agree with this. So, how is it not logical that we join together to simply repeal the government legislation prohibiting buying insurance across state lines?

This point suggests that there are simpler solutions to the problem than creating a new government bureaucracy.

Nonsense. That is nothing more than a ridiculous republican talking point.
This is the same hogwash tactic that was used by the Reagan administration for the idea of "welfare queens".

I've already posted evidence showing this. Do you have any evidence showing the contrary?

Considering that by all other estimates, worldwide medical travelers already number in the millions, the fact that Forbes would state about the study that "It narrowly defined medical travelers as only those whose primary and explicit purpose in traveling was to obtain in-patient medical treatment in a foreign country, putting the total number of travelers at 60,000 to 85,000 per year." just shows that they are twisting the numbers from the get go.

How is that twisting numbers? They clearly explain the criteria they used for their study.

Let's take a moment to look at a single but HUGE statistical error in your "study".
McKinsey only counted in-patient procedures while ignoring the fact that the vast majority of medical travel is not for in-patient procedures.

This doesn't describe a "statistical error" of any kind. Are you saying that more people are going to the US for procedures that require that they stay the night in the hospital but more people are going elsewhere for procedures that don't require that? Do you have any evidence demonstrating that to be the case?

Do inpatient procedures not indicate where people are going when quality matters more than cost? Someone trying to save money with an inexpensive boob-job in another country is not an indication that the quality of our health care is lower.

And that's before McKinsey even starts to massage the rest of the numbers by only using data from a very small percentage of wordwide hospitals that only belong to a particular accrediting body (50) while ignoring all other in-patient procedures done at the thousands upon thousands of other hospitals, surgery centers, and clinics around the world.

You are mistaken. There are more than 50 JCI hospitals in the world and the report used data from non-JCI as well as JCI hospitals.

So from the beginning, out of the estimated 5 million worldwide medical travelers, the McKinsey "study" pretends that more than 98% (4.9 million) don't even exist.

No they don't. They simply define their criteria.

So out of the 2% left, they further state that 40% of those travelers are the wealthy ones that don't care about cost or distance and just want the very best that money can buy (because they can afford it).

The article further states that of that 40%, "Most of those patients in search of the best care" are going to the US.

Exactly. Indicating that the US provides the highest quality medical care in the world. Those that can afford it will go to great lengths to receive it.

So to recap Forbes and McKinsey, "most" of less than half of 2% of medical travelers are headed for the United States.

To re-cap: the majority of people going somewhere for a procedure complicated enough that it requires they stay at a hospital over night are going to the US. This is an indication that the quality of health care in the US is very high.