In 2011, cystic fibrosis researchers noticed something weird. Patients with this deadly genetic disorder were living longer and longer — but those in Canada seemed to be living significantly longer than those in the United States.
The researchers wondered if the Canadian patients were actually more likely to survive longer, or if something else was going on. Were there differences in the way each country gathered its data? “Perhaps Canada collected data on mild cystic fibrosis patients more than the US,” said Dr. Anne Stephenson, a physician-researcher specializing in cystic fibrosis at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.
But that didn’t turn out to be true. Six years and plenty of statistical analyses later, Stephenson and her colleagues found that the median age of survival for Canadians was 50, and only 40 for Americans. The gap persisted even when they looked only at data from the most severe cases.
“In a way people should be alarmed,” said Stephenson. “It will make people motivated to reduce that gap.”
To Kevin Gorey, a University of Windsor epidemiologist who studies how health outcomes differ on each side of the border, that is the probably biggest difference in survival he’s ever seen: It’s “stunning,” he said.
“A ten-year difference … that’s lots of years spent with your child or not, having fun with your friends, living your life,” said Gorey, who was not involved in the study. “That’s a huge, huge human tragedy.”
But those results, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine, also ask some hard questions about the American health care system, and why it may not be as good at keeping patients alive.
“But some of the paper’s most striking results don’t have to do with
specific treatments. Instead, they have to do with health insurance.”More on that point from the article:
The Canadians, all of whom get government-provided health coverage, had the same risk of dying as those Americans who had private insurance. When compared with Americans on continuous Medicare and Medicaid, though, Canadians’ risk of death was 44 percent lower. And the disparity was even greater when it came to Americans with no insurance at all.
Denying poor people healthcare kills them, who knew?
Canadians with cystic fibrosis outlive Americans by a decade
QueerAnarchism 