Our new survey on the continuing woes of our health care system has drawn considerable comment from people with passionate views both for and against the reform legislation being debated in Congress.
We’re guessing that some of those who have come here are new to Consumer Reports and may not be aware of the work we’ve been doing for years on the U.S. health system, such as the visitor who wrote:
Give us reviews of the insurance companies so that we the consumers can make informed decisions.
As longtime readers know, we’ve been reporting on health insurance for the past several years. Subscribers can access our Ratings of PPOs and Ratings of HMOs, and all visitors can learn how to select good health plans, avoid bad ones, and make the most of the coverage they have.
Several commenters pointed to cancer survival statistics showing that Americans live longer after diagnosis with many cancers than do people living in European countries with universal health care. These statistics are a favorite of health-reform foes, but FactCheck.org, a project of the nonprofit Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, cautions that:
comparing [cancer] survival rates isn’t necessarily an accurate measure, and it certainly isn’t a simple reflection of health care quality.
(See the whole FactCheck discourse on this controversial subject.)
Moreover, overall cancer death rates in the U.S. are no better than those of other industrialized countries with universal care, as we noted in Are Americans healthier than other nations?, the third in a series of blogs published a few months back comparing our system to that of Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Japan. (For more information, see the other parts of the series, including Health care: Paying more and getting what?, What are we getting for the big bucks? More MRIs, and Death by bad health care.)
—Nancy Metcalf, Senior Program Editor
Previous
Post a comment
Comments: