Well here you go. The United Kingdom's National Health Service is often held up (by Bernie Sanders, et al) as the gold standard for what we should have. It is much less costly. OK, but there's such as thing as the law of diminishing returns and also the expression "You get what you pay for." Only in one case, France with liver cancer, do either of these healthcare systems show better outcomes than the USA, and that is by a small amount. FULL DISCLOSURE: I started this weblog way back in 2005 to report on my own chemotherapy treatment for lymphoma. And I'm still here.
Where You Want to Get Cancer. Mortality rates are falling, especially if you live in the U.S.
Excerpt from the editorial is below the graph.
The five-year survival rate is now 98% for prostate cancer, 92% for melanoma and 90% for breast cancer. Between 2013 and 2017, the death rate for men with melanoma declined by a stunning 7.6% annually. Screening and treatment improvements also helped reduce the death rate for breast cancer by an average of 1.5% annually from 2008 to 2017.
Scientific understanding of cancer and its genetic determinants has advanced by leaps over the past decade. Most women now know, for example, that mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes increase the risk for breast and ovarian cancers.
****************************
But the drugs require enormous investment and therefore aren’t cheap once they’re approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The United Kingdom’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has rejected immunotherapies because they were too expensive, though it has had to relent in some cases after patient protests.
Such government rationing and price controls on drugs are one major reason that countries with socialized medicine like the United Kingdom have lower cancer survival rates than the U.S. The age-adjusted cancer mortality rate is about 20% higher in the U.K and 10% higher in Canada and France than in the U.S. Survival rates for hard-to-treat cancers are also higher in the U.S. than in most countries with nationalized health systems.
According to a study in the journal Lancet last year, an individual diagnosed with pancreatic cancer between 2010 and 2014 had nearly twice the likelihood of surviving five years in the U.S. than in the U.K. The five-year survival rate for brain cancer in the U.S. is 36.5% compared to 27.2% in France and 26.3% in the U.K. For stomach cancer the five-year survival rate is 33.1% in the U.S. compared to 26.7% in France and 20.7% in the U.K.
Diagnostic and treatment advances in the U.S. are also accelerating. Google’s artificial intelligence can now detect breast and lung cancers with better accuracy—meaning fewer false positives and negatives—than radiologists. AI systems are also enabling researchers to identify more genetic links and to personalize treatments.
Even the report’s gloomiest news has a silver lining. Death rates for liver cancer are rising faster than for other forms of the disease, but Hepatitis C drugs could greatly reduce the incidence and have come down 80% in price since 2014. It’s also worth highlighting that the disparity in cancer death rates between blacks and whites declined to 13% in 2017 from a peak of 33% in 1993.
Recent Comments