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August 28, 2007

United States Leads All Developed Countries -- Even Those With Universal Health Care -- In Cancer Survival

Carroll Andrew Morse

According to a study published in The Lancet Oncology medical journal, the United States has the best cancer survival rate in the developed world. The tables below are from an article on the study published in Britain's Daily Telegraph (h/t Andrew Stuttaford)…

Female Cancer Survival Rates
USA62.9%
Iceland61.8%
Sweden61.7%
Belgium61.6%
Finland61.1%
Switzerland61.1%
Italy59.7%
Spain59.0%
Germany58.8%
Norway58.4%
Netherlands58.3%
Austria58.0%
Malta54.6%
Wales54.1%
Slovenia52.9%
England52.7%
Ireland51.9%
N. Ireland51.0%
Czech Republic49.3%
Poland48.3%
Scotland48.0%

Male Cancer Survival Rates
USA66.3%
Sweden60.3%
Iceland57.7%
Finland55.9%
Austria55.4%
Switzerland54.6%
Belgium53.2%
Norway52.0%
Germany50.0%
Italy49.8%
Spain49.5%
Ireland48.1%
Wales47.9%
Netherlands47.1%
England44.8%
Malta42.3%
N. Ireland42.0%
Scotland40.2%
Poland38.8%
Czech Republic37.7%
Slovenia36.6%

"Survival rate" was defined as "the number of patients who are alive five years after diagnosis".

The Telegraph article, focused on Britain's poor showing in the study, contains a couple of notable observations…

  1. For women, England was the fifth worst in a league of 22 countries. Scotland came bottom. Cancer experts blamed late diagnosis and long waiting lists.… Prof Richard Sullivan at Cancer Research UK said: "Cancer is still not being diagnosed early enough in all cases."
    But wait – I thought this wasn't possible in a country with a "universal" health care system. Don't universal health care proponents promise that universality guarantees that everyone will have their illnesses diagnosed early?

  2. A second article, which looked at 2.7 million patients diagnosed between 1995 and 1999, found that countries that spent the most on health per capita per year had better survival rates.

    Britain was the exception. Despite spending up to £1,500 on health per person per year, it recorded similar survival rates for Hodgkin's disease and lung cancer as Poland, which spends a third of that amount.

    Contrary to what the folk-Marxists out there argue, not every problem can be solved by increasing the resources controlled by government. How money gets spent matters. And big government bureaucracies are simply not the best option for making medical decisions that will have life or death impacts on individual people.
Comments

WHAT!? This study is flawed. Where is Cuba? Surely they must be near the top.

Posted by: Greg at August 28, 2007 2:03 PM

Recount. Michael Moore can't be wrong.

Posted by: SusanD at August 28, 2007 4:06 PM

Not only Cuba, where is Canada? Aren't we supposed to be looking forward to Czarina Clinton changing our health care system to the Canadian model?

Posted by: Ben at August 28, 2007 6:46 PM

In his latest comedy, Sicko, Michael Moore states that 18,000 people die each year from from lack of health care. But each year over 100k die from medical bleeps, bloops, and blunders. Which is worse?

Posted by: PDM at August 29, 2007 1:26 AM