Canadians have a greater risk of dying within five years after a common type of heart attack than their American cousins, a study comparing treatments in the two countries suggests.
The research, to be published in an upcoming issue of Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, suggests that more conservative treatments in Canada may be behind the difference in survival rates, said Padma Kaul, an epidemiologist at the University of Alberta and lead investigator of the study.
Kaul found that within five years of initial treatment for a heart attack caused by a completely blocked coronary artery (about one-third of heart attacks are this type), the U.S. patients had a death rate of 19.6 per cent versus 21.4 per cent for the Canadians.
That roughly two per cent difference may seem small, but on a population basis, it could represent thousands of lost lives.
“One possible explanation is the difference in the revascularization rates between the two countries, and those were significantly different,” said Kaul, explaining that U.S. doctors perform about three times the number of angioplasties and coronary bypass surgeries done by Canadian physicians.
What? Why would there be a difference in revascularization rates? Surely Canada’s compassionate, free, government-run system would provide superior care to the eeeeevil, corporate health care system here in fascist Amerikkka? Let’s explore.
Almost one-third of the U.S. patients had angioplasty after a heart attack, compared to 11.4 per cent in Canada. More than 13 per cent of those in the U.S. group had bypass, while just four per cent of Canadian patients were referred for the open-heart surgery.
“Traditionally, I think, the U.S. practises way more aggressively than Canadian practice in terms of using revasc procedures, and that’s been shown repeatedly,” Kaul said from Edmonton, noting that Canadian physicians are more apt to treat heart attack patients with only clot-busting drugs like TPA and streptokinase.
What? You mean Canada’s compassionate, free health care system would (gasp!) cut costs by using cheap drugs instead of expensive surgery? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you!
[I]n 2002, Kaul analysed records from 23,000 Americans and almost 2,900 Canadians in the original study to determine how many were still alive within five years of initial treatment.
Even though the Canadian patients had better health profiles overall - fewer had diabetes or high blood pressure, for instance - survival rates were higher for the U.S. patients.
How can this be? Canadians are healthier to begin with, yet their lard-asses American cousins, with their eeeevil, corporate, for-profit health care system end up with higher survival rates? Impossible!
[T]he study showed Canadian physicians were more likely to send heart attack patients home with a prescription for beta blockers to regulate their heart rate (62 per cent), compared with U.S. patients (53 per cent).
Of course. When health care is “free” and seeing a doctor is a “right,” costs must be kept down by lowering service and treatment.
While Canadian physicians are performing more angiograms (a diagnostic procedure to detect artery blockage), angioplasties and bypass operations than they were 10 years ago, access to operating rooms and labs to perform angiograms and angioplasties still lags behind demand - and falls far short of what’s available in the United States, experts say. [Emphasis added]
Access to health care “falls far short” of what’s available in the US. Those of you who are in favor of a Canadian socialist goatfuck health care system need to read that sentence over and over and over again.
Update: Since there seem to be some relatively new people participating in this discussion, I’ll make one point specifically clear. I do not believe that America’s health care system is perfect, Far from it. There are myriad steps we can take to improve our system, lower prices, and increase availability of treatment. Going to a big government socialist health care bureaucracy like that of Britain, Canada, France, or Australia is just not the answer. Michae Moore once famously asked, “Look at Canada. Do you think you can find five people who don’t like their health care system?” There is a huge myth among the American left that Canada’s system is the gold standard, and that all our problems would disappear if we just adopted their way of doing things. My health care posts are selected to show that there are huge downsides to the socialist health care model, including waiting lists, decreased service, and lower standards of care. There is room for a legitimate debate on this issue from both sides of the aisle, but suffice it to say that I am diametrically opposed to implementing the Canadian way of doing things.
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