UK (socialized medicine) cancer survival rates lag the rest of Europe - and well behind the USA

Periodically I see articles (or they're sent to me by a good friend of mine in the UK) extolling the great glories of the UK NHS (National Health Service). They are frequently from the left wing Guardian (UK) newspaper. Well, last week the Guardian ran this article -

UK cancer survival rates trail 10 years behind other European countries

A revealing article.

So I went to the massive international study this was based on, which you can find here in the British Journal The Lancet -

Global surveillance of cancer survival 1995–2009: analysis of individual data for 25 676 887 patients from 279 population-based registries in 67 countries (CONCORD-2)

With two minutes of digging I found the following chart, with data on ten different cancers (but not lymphoma) and survival rates in all the countries.

5-year age-standardised net survival for adults (aged 15–99 years) diagnosed with one of ten common malignant diseases and children (aged 0–14 years) with ALL, by continent, country, and calendar period of diagnosis

To keep this post short, here  is a  comparison from the above chart of the five year survival rate % for the UK and the USA (pre-Obamacare) and three other countires for three different cancers.

In 2000, the World Health Organization (WHO) ranked France and Italy #'s one and two for their healthcare systems.

                                Breast                    Prostate                    Leukemia

USA                            89                            97                            52

UK                              81                            83                            47

France                        87                            91                            59

Italy                            86                           90                            47

Australia                    86                            89                            51

Happily the survival rate for childhood leukemia is 88-89% in all five countries.

The moral of the story: for all the moaning about the X million number of people in the US who don't have health insurance, actual healthCARE is pretty darn good. Maybe we need to be careful about messing with the system.