EDITORIAL: Lack of health plan kills 100,000 a year
A report released last week on the quality of health care in the industrialized world attached numbers to a problem we already recognized.
America's health care system is killing us -- at least 100,000 of us every year.
Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine reviewed records on preventable deaths from 19 industrial nations and found our health care system to be the worst of the bunch -- well behind countries such as France, Japan and Australia that have universal health care policies.
It's not the quality of American care itself that causes 100,000 unnecessary deaths every year, researcher Ellen Nolte said. It's the inability of patients to get that care.
"I wouldn't say it (the last-place ranking handed to the United States) is a condemnation because I think health care in the U.S. is pretty good if you have access," she said. "But if you don't, I think that's the main problem, isn't it?"
Read the rest here.
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