Old Yanks Have More Chronic Illnesses Than Brits, But Live Longer

RAND corporation researchers have taken a look at chronic disease rates among older folks in the U.S. and the U.K and find that Americans suffer at twice the rate that Brits do. So they must be dropping like flies, right? Well, actually no. It turns out that the beneficiaries of Britain's National Health Service have a higher mortality rate than do benighted Americans who cling to the last vestiges of their private health insurance system. Last vestiges? Of course, Medicare is government-run but it benefits from the spillover advances made and paid for by private medicine. As ScienceDaily reports:

Researchers found that while Americans aged 55 to 64 have higher rates of chronic diseases than their peers in England, they died at about the same rate. And Americans age 65 and older—while still sicker than their English peers—had a lower death rate than similar people in England, according to findings published in the journal Demography….

"If you get sick at older ages, you will die sooner in England than in the United States," Smith said. "It appears that at least in terms of survival at older ages with chronic disease, the medical system in the United States may be better than the system in England." …

The findings showed that both disease prevalence and the onset of new disease were higher among Americans for the illnesses studied—diabetes, high-blood pressure, heart disease, heart attack, stroke, chronic lung diseases and cancer. Researchers found that the higher prevalence of illness among Americans compared to the English that they previously found for those aged 55 to 64 was also apparent for those in their 70s. Diabetes rates were almost twice as high in the United States as in England (17.2 percent versus 10.4 percent) and cancer prevalence was more than twice as high in the United States (17.9 percent compared to 7.8 percent) for people in their 70s.

In spite of both higher prevalence and incidence of disease in America, death rates among Americans were about the same in the younger ages in this period of life and actually lower at older ages compared to the English.

Researchers say there are two possible explanations why death rates are higher for English after age 65 as compared to Americans. One is that the illnesses studied result in higher mortality in England than in the United States. The second is that the English are diagnosed at a later stage in the disease process than Americans.

"Both of these explanations imply that there is higher-quality medical care in the United States than in England, at least in the sense that these chronic illnesses are less likely to cause death among people living in the United States," Smith said.

"The United States' health problem is not fundamentally a health care or insurance problem, at least at older ages," Banks said. "It is a problem of excess illness and the solution to that problem may lie outside the health care delivery system. The solution may be to alter lifestyles or other behaviors."

The good news is that American medicine so far has been increasingly able to rescue many of us who insist on enjoying in our bad health habits. The bad news is that health nannies now aim to force us to shape up. If we refuse, we will eventually be blessed with the same results that socialized medicine produces in Britain: Die and save the taxpayers money.

Kudos to Phil Meade.