The Burrill Report


Forget obesity, smoking, traffic fatalities and murder. What’s really killing Americans is our poor healthcare system says a new study of health spending and behavioral risk factors conducted by Columbia University.

Despite huge expenditures for health services, the study found that 15-year survival rates for American men and women ages 45 and 65 have fallen relative to the other 12 countries over the past 30 years.

“It was shocking to see the U.S. falling behind other countries even as costs soared ahead of them,” says lead author Peter Muennig, an assistant professor of health policy and management at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Muennig and his colleagues reviewed the impact of risk factors including smoking, obesity, traffic accidents, homicides, and racial and ethnic diversity on life expectancy rates in 12 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

“The U.S. doesn’t stand out as doing any worse in these areas than any of the other countries we studied, leading us to believe that failings in the U.S. healthcare system, such as costly specialized and fragmented care, are likely playing a large role in this relatively poor performance on improvements in life expectancy,” says Muennig.

In the United StateS, 45 year old white women have fared the worst. By 2005 their 15-year survival rates were lower than that of all the other countries, the study found. The 15-year life expectancy for 45-year-old American men also declined, falling from third in 1975 to twelfth in 2005.

The study, “What Changes in Survival Rates Tell Us about U.S. Health Care,” is published in the journal Health Affairs and can be found here.


October 08, 2010
http://www.burrillreport.com/article-short_lives_big_bills.html