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cyu
10th November 2012, 14:40
McCarthyism: The Elephant in the Room

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/10/health-costs-how-the-us-compares-with-other-countries.html

How much is good health care worth to you? $8,233 per year? That figure is more than two-and-a-half times more than most developed nations in the world.

There are fewer physicians per person than in most other OECD countries. In 2010, the U.S. had 2.4 practicing physicians per 1,000 people -- well below below the OECD average of 3.1.

The number of hospital beds in the U.S. was 2.6 per 1,000 population in 2009, lower than the OECD average of 3.4 beds.

Life expectancy at birth increased by almost nine years between 1960 and 2010, but that's less than the increase of over 15 years in Japan and over 11 years on average in OECD countries.

Whether measured relative to its population or its economy, the United States spends by far the most in the world on health care. it devotes far more of its economy -- 17.6 percent of GDP in 2010 -- to health than any other country. The Netherlands is the next highest, at 12 percent of GDP, and the average among OECD countries was almost half that of the U.S., at 9.5 percent of GDP.

nearly $900 per person per year goes on administrative costs. This is far higher than in, say, France, which spends $300 per person.

a hospital stay in the United States costs over $18,000 on average. The countries that come closest to spending as much -- Canada, the Netherlands, Japan -- spend between $4,000 and $6,000 less per stay. Across OECD countries, the average cost of a hospital stay is about one-third that of the U.S., at $6,200.

erupt
11th November 2012, 22:48
I remember seeing the majority of these statistics in some form or another somewhere before and I remember thinking exactly what you've named the thread. :)

CryingWolf
11th November 2012, 23:25
When capitalists have a stranglehold on your health care...

You might be living in America...

cyu
24th January 2014, 10:02
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood_products

Bayer's Cutter Biological division acknowledged that "There is strong evidence to suggest that AIDS is passed on to other people through plasma products." a heat-treated" concentrate rendered the virus "undetectable" in the product

There is excess nonheated inventory. Cutter decided to sell millions of dollars of the older medicine to Asia and Latin America while selling the new, safer product in the West, to avoid being stuck with large stores of a product that was proving increasingly unmarketable.

Cutter asked the distributor to "use up stocks" of the old medicine before switching to its "safer, better" product. once haemophiliacs in Hong Kong began testing positive for HIV, some local doctors began to question whether Cutter was dumping "AIDS tainted" medicine into less-developed countries.

The United States Food and Drug Administration helped to keep the news out of the public eye. the FDA's regulator of blood products, Harry M. Meyer Jr., called together officials of the companies. Meyer asked that the issue be "quietly solved without alerting the Congress, the medical community and the public"

In France, three politicians delayed the introduction of United States blood-screening test in France until a rival French product was ready to be sold on the market.

Criminalize Heterosexuality
24th January 2014, 13:34
You might be living in America...

You might be living anywhere. America isn't somehow qualitatively different from other capitalist states, although they do tend to be more direct, bless them.