Ever Wonder How We in the U.S. Could Be So SICK, When We Spend So Much Money On Health Care?

Posted by McCamy Taylor in General Discussion

Light up, America!

If you are a heavy smoker, you can now get a lottery ticket that will give you a one in five chance of beating your first lung cancer!

Whoopee! I'll smoke to that!




The United States ranks at the bottom of industrialized nations when it comes to measures of health, such as infant mortality (ours is high) and life expectancy (ours is low). However, we spend twice as much per person on health care as any other country in the world. And that includes Canada and France.

A study released by the National Cancer Institute explains how this is possible. The National Lung Screening Trial studied 53,000 heavy smokers and former heavy smokers over the age of 55 for 20 months. Half got annual chest x-rays---already shown to have no effect in decreasing deaths from lung cancer. Half got CT scans each year. The CT scan group ended up with 20% fewer lung cancer deaths.

http://www.cancer.gov/newscenter/pressrele...

Eureka! Exclaims the New York Times. Now you can smoke your unfiltered Camels---and get a lottery ticket that gives you a one in five change of beating the (first) lung cancer that you will get from smoking.

The findings represent an enormous advance in cancer detection that could potentially save thousands of lives annually, although at considerable expenseThe findings represent an enormous advance in cancer detection that could potentially save thousands of lives annually, although at considerable expense.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/health/r...

Just how expensive will all those CT scans for heavy smokers be? Almost 20% ( 43 million) Americans smoke. That number is the same when you just consider middle aged Americans, too—the ones considered in the NLST study.

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/m...

According to the U.S. Census there are around 40 million Americans who fall into the age range of 55-74—and this is the fastest growing demographic group in the country. So, if 20% of these folks smoke or used to smoke, that means 8 million CT scans a year. At $300 each, that means $2.4 billion a year spent on medical tests to catch one in ten cancers when they can be treated. Not so bad, until you consider that a “positive” CT scan does not necessarily mean cancer. Lots of people will go through unnecessary---and much more expensive and risky---testing, such as bronchoscopy and biopsy to prove that the little blip on their CT scan was not cancer. That will raise the expense of this medical “breakthrough” considerably.

It gets even worse if you consider the effect on the individual smoker. Now that there is a (slim) chance that smoking induced lung cancer can be caught in time, smokers will lose a powerful disincentive to smoke. If the new medical standard becomes a CT scan every year for smokers, then some smokers who might have quit because of fear of cancer will decide to keep puffing away---even though 80% of them destined to get cancer will still die. Why would Americans bet their lives on those kinds of odds? Because we all love to play the lottery. It is easy to convince ourselves that we will be among the lucky 20%.

Keep in mind that cancer is not the main way that smoking kills. Heart disease is the number on killer in the country, and smoking causes heart disease. The net result of this kind of “medical breakthrough” could actually be more premature deaths from heart attacks, emphysema, stroke and non-lung cancers associated with smoking (head and neck tumors, for example), if smokers decide to continue puffing away, secure in the knowledge that they now have a 20% chance of beating lung cancer.

The solution to all this lung cancer death---and the way to cut our rates of heart disease, other lung disease and stroke---is public health policy designed to keep people from smoking in the first place and encourage those who do smoke to stop before their addiction injures their health. However, prevention is a four letter word in America, where the medical industrial complex gets rich applying expensive---and often ineffective---Band-aids to treat diseases that could have been prevented in the first place at little to no cost.
.
.
.