Speaking of "bad" and "stats", yesterday I saw a TV commercial, probably paid for by the insurance lobby, that featured one woman playing a breast cancer survivor (maybe she really is, I don't know) who urges people to oppose a "government takeover of health care". She cites stats that show that England has a worse breast cancer survival rate than the US and uses that to say that X number of more women will die in the US if government takes over our health care. Talk about dishonest cherry-picking and fear mongering. What about other cancers and factors and other countries with govt health care? In fact I've read that overall Europe has a higher cancer survival rate than the US. Sure there are some exceptions, and this UK breast cancer thing is probably one of them. But to cherry pick like that and use that as the whole argument against govt health care just really makes me mad.
BTW, here are some breast cancer survival rates:
Quote:
Five year relative breast cancer survival rates from CONCORD study.
Rank....Country....mean (95% confidence interval)
1..........Cuba..........84.0 (82.9, 85.2)
2..........US.............83.9 (83.7, 84.1)
3..........Canada......82.5 (81.9, 83.0)
4.........Sweden......82.0 (81.2, 82.7)
5.........Japan..........81.6 (79.5, 83.5)
6.........Australia.. ..80.7 (80.1, 81.3)
8.........France........79.8 (78.2, 81.4)
22.......England......69.8 (69.5, 70.2)
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EDIT: upon reading more into this, it seems that later implementation of screening in England is a big factor. Notice in the chart below how their breast cancer detection and survival have BOTH increased over the years:
