Why We Need Universal Healthcare
Uninsured women are three times more likely than the well-insured to have their breast cancers diagnosed when it may be too late to cure them, according to a major study published this week by the American Cancer Society. Uninsured patients with colon cancer are twice as likely to be diagnosed in the late stages, it found. Previous, smaller studies have shown similar results, but this piece of research included 3.7 million patients -- about 75 percent of all U.S. cancer patients diagnosed between 1998 and 2004.
Both colorectal and breast cancers can be detected with routine screening, which is precisely what the uninsured don't get. Interestingly, the rate of late-stage diagnosis of ovarian and pancreatic cancers--two diseases that are difficult to detect early--was roughly the same in insured and uninsured patients.
The authors found that Medicaid does a bad job of getting people to doctors before their cancers have progressed; Medicaid patients were nearly as likely as the uninsured to be in Stage III or Stage IV of breast or colon cancer when diagnosis occurred. Hispanics and, especially, blacks, also are more likely to have their cancers diagnosed late, regardless of health insurance status. This points to "social and cultural factors which might limit access" for the poor, the authors write--things as simple as lack of transport and proximity to doctors, or as complex as lack of education, fear, stoicism and denial.
The study appeared in the Feb. 15 issue of Lancet Oncology; the abstract is linked here.
Comments:
Posted 02/21/2008 08:29pm with
If you believe the American Cancer Society is capable of telling the truth about cancer treatment, I have a bridge in the New York City east river to sell you.
Here’s a little known fact about the ACS. They have support groups, people who have received cancer treatment, who provide encouragement and answers to newly diagnosed cancer people. To join a group, you have to promise to not describe any of your personal experiences of treatment. Wonder why?
Medical insurance was begun by physicians in the 1930’s to cover up their passion for diagnostic tests, which demonstrated not a smidgen of contribution to authentically curative results, but which worked wonders in facilitating the physician’s need to ignore their abysmal results.
The more medical insurance you provide, the more unhealthy people become.
The problem is conventional medicine’s insistence that illness is caused by pathology (physical body tissues malfunctioning). And that if no pathology can be found, there is no real illness; all “non-real” illnesses being called psychosomatic.
Here are some facts to chew on. In 70 out of every 100 persons who feel ill and visit a physician, no pathology can be found. Which means no curative treatment can be found, and palliation (making the patient temporarily feel better) is all that’s available. If cure is defined as get sick, then are treated, become fully healthy (achieve well-being), treatment is stopped, and the illness doesn’t return, the cure rate for this group is 0%.
In 6 out of that hundred, pathology is found, and the illness is acute; acute being defined as came on suddenly, gets progressively worse and then goes away (or the person dies, which is a small minority), all over a few week period. In essence the cure rate in this group is 100%.
In 24 out of that 100 pathology is found and the illness is chronic; meaning lasts for a long time. Curative treatment is available; such treatment being called curative because the pathology is removed or controlled. In every single case, discomforting symptoms continue and progressive increase. In time the physician of everyone with a chronic illness tells that person that physician’s version of the following, “learn to live with this problem, because you will have it until you die”. In this group the cure rate is 0%. So conventional medicine, who gave us health insurance in the first place has a 0% cure rate in 94% of its cases. Which is a failure rate of 94%.
Continuing to chase after new diagnosis and treatment techniques in a paradigm which has repeatedly demonstrated a 94% failure rate for over 150 years (modern medicine began in the 1850’s) is the major basis for the steadily increasing cost of health insurance.
Warren