I won’t go into a long rant on this, just because this story out of the UK speaks for itself. A premie strong enough to breathe on its own for two hours outside of the womb is deemed to still be a fetus and denied care and dies in his mother’s arms.
Premature baby ‘left to die’ by doctors after mother gives birth just two days before 22-week care limit
Is this what you really want for the American health care system? Somehow I doubt it if it meant you or your child would be left to die because of some cold governmental rules that dictated you weren’t worthy of care.
From rachel on 9/9/09, 9:19AM (admin manual import):
Well, I won’t go into a long rant on this either, but:
1. 22 weeks is barely at the bottom end of viability (50% chance of viability falls around week 24) and this infant hadn’t even reached that far. It’s a sad case, but the poor woman is deluding herself thinking there was any chance of survival at all let alone survival with any reasonable quality of life.
2. The current infant mortality rate in the US is about 6.3/1000 live births. The infant mortality rate in the UK is about 4.8/1000 live births. I submit that disinterested government bureaucrats are probably better for infant health than greedy insurance company bureaucrats.
admin response on 9/9/09, 10:31AM (admin manual import):
While you are correct that survival chances are very low at that point of gestation, I don’t think it should be a government bureaucrat that is making medical decisions that dictate who lives and who dies. At minimum it should be a medical doctor making an assessment of appropriate treatment based on first-hand observations of the individual patient. In this case that the child was able to breath on its own for two hours outside the womb suggests the child’s chance of survival was better than average for that stage of development and at minimum warranted an evaluation from a doctor to see if treatment would be beneficial.
From rachel on 9/9/09, 3:55PM and 4:05PM (admin manual import):
1. Who do you think told the “government bureaucrat” that the cut-off for treatment should be 22 weeks? The “government bureaucrats” did not just pull that number out of thin air; they chose that date after consulting with… Wait for it… Doctors!
2. Is it really that much better to have insurance company bureaucrats instead, who tell you “You can do what you want, but we’re not going to pay for it because the baby has a pre-existing condition?” Don’t think that hasn’t happened in the US; it has, and afterwards families have wound up under mountains of debt in addition to dead or permanently disabled babies.
Do you even know your insurance company’s cut-off date for treatment for premature babies? If you’re betting they don’t have one, I’ll take a piece of that action.
3. I see you have not addressed the fact that a higher percentage of babies survive in the UK than in the US. (This pattern is repeated over and over and over when comparing to US to countries that have government-regulated healthcare. Even South Korea, even Cuba have better outcomes for infants than the US does.) This suggests to me that your distaste for these systems is is not rational, but rather a knee-jerk response, and that too many people pay more attention to sad stories that fit their preconceptions than they do to facts or statistics.
Oh, and one more thing I forgot to mention before: there are also private hospitals in the UK, and if you don’t want to follow the NHS rules and guidlines, you can go to one of them for treatment. Of course, you have to pay more for that…
admin response on 9/10/09, 7:50AM (admin manual import):
As this is a personal finance blog and not a political blog, I’m going to limit my response to the following.
1. I never said that the bureaucrats did not consult doctors in formulating their guidelines, however no two patients are alike. That the fate of an individual patient will be decided based on the guidance of a far-away doctor looking at general trends instead of a doctor that is actually in a position to evaluate the condition of the individual patient seems illogical to me.
2. Thankfully I don’t know what my insurance company’s cut-off for treatment of premies is. However, at least in our system a doctor will evaluate the child to determine if treatment would even be beneficial. The family may ultimately be responsible for the cost, but at least they have the option.
3. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics, as I’ve heard it said before. I didn’t respond to your point about infant mortality because there are so many factors that play into that rate besides the quality of the health care system (child abuse and neglect, the age of the birth mother carrying the child, etc.). There are also questions as to what is being counted as a infant death vs. a stillbirth. In any case, the US rate is still well below the world rate of 49.4 and the difference in rates between most industrialized nations is not large.
As for Cuba, their numbers are going to be based on reporting and data provided by the Cuban government, and if you trust anything the Cuban government says then I have a sack of magic beans I’d like to sell you.
Bonus point
4. Thank goodness there is an alternative to NHS in the UK, but I don’t see why someone who is getting their care in the private sector should have to pay for the government-provided care through their taxes as well. It is similar to the families here in the US that have to pay tuition to private schools for their own children and pay taxes to support inferior public schools that have shown themselves incapable of providing a basic education to the students they serve. Ultimately you pay for the same thing twice or settle for an inadequate product.
Based on my observations, there is little that our government has done that it has not royally f-ed up. I don’t want the same government that can’t administer “Cash for Clunkers” or finish building a fence on the Mexican border, much less defend it, to be in charge of my health care.
Time to move on to other topics, some of which may fit with the theme of this blog (but no guarantees).