They're not blaming the differences of health on the differences in
healthcare coverage. As a matter of fact, the experts are kind of
baffled as to why there's such a difference in health. Apparently
it's not due to Britain's universal healthcare.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20060503/D8HC1JS85.html

excerpt:

"It's something of a mystery," said Richard Suzman of the U.S.
National Institutes of Health, which helped fund the study.

Health experts have known the U.S. population is less healthy than
that of other industrialized nations, according to several important
measurements, including life expectancy. The U.S. ranks behind about
two dozen other countries, according to the World Health
Organization.

Some have believed the United States has lagged because it is more
ethnically diverse, said Suzman, who heads the National Institute on
Aging's Behavioral and Social Research Program. "Minority health in
general is worse than white health," he said.

But the new study showed that when minorities are removed from the
equation, and adjustments are made to control for education and
income, white people in England are still healthier than white
people in the United States.

"As far as I know, this is the first study showing this," said
Suzman. The study, supported by grants from government agencies in
both countries, was published in Wednesday's Journal of the American
Medical Association.

Other studies have measured the United States against other
countries in terms of health care spending, use of medical care and
availability of health care services. But this is the first to focus
on prevalence of chronic conditions, said Anderson, the Johns
Hopkins professor.

Differences in exercise might partly explain the gap, he suggested.
One of the study's authors, Jim Smith, said the English exercise
somewhat more than Americans. But physical activity differences
won't fully explain the study's results, he added.

Marmot offered a different explanation for the gap: Americans'
financial insecurity. Improvements in household income have eluded
all but the top fifth of Americans since the mid-1970s. Meanwhile,
the English saw their incomes improve, he said.

Robert Blendon, a professor of health policy at the Harvard School
of Public Health who was not involved in the study, said the stress
of striving for the American dream may account for Americans' lousy
health.

"The opportunity to go both up and down the socioeconomic scale in
America may create stress," Blendon said. Americans don't have a
reliable government safety net like the English enjoy, Blendon said.

However, Britain's universal health-care system shouldn't get credit
for better health, Marmot and Blendon agreed.

Both said it might explain better health for low-income citizens,
but can't account for better health of Britain's more affluent
residents.

Marmot cautioned against looking for explanations in the two
countries' health-care systems.

"It's not just how we treat people when they get ill, but why they
get ill in the first place," Marmot said.




--- In andylang@yahoogroups.com, "Janet Krueger" <janet.krueger@...>
wrote:
>
> JAMA: National Healthcare is the way to go
>
> Just in case anyone is still dragging their feet on getting single-
payer healthcare in America, from Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly:
>
>
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_05/008727.p
hp
> YES, NATIONAL HEALTHCARE REALLY IS THE WAY TO GO....Advocates of
universal healthcare frequently claim that European-style national
healthcare systems, aside from being fairer, are just more efficient
than ours. They provide decent healthcare at a lower cost than the
jumbled, pseudo-free market system we have in the United States.
>
> But is it true? Do even relatively mediocre, underfunded national
healthcare systems like the one in Britain perform as well as
American healthcare? A new study published in the Journal of the
American Medical Association reaches a pretty unambiguous conclusion.
>
> The researchers studied health outcomes in both countries and
controlled for age by comparing only people aged 55-64. They
controlled for race by studying only non-Hispanic whites. They
controlled for obesity. They controlled for income. They controlled
for education. They controlled for everything they could think of.
Here's what they found:
>
> "At every point in the social hierarchy there is more illness in
the United States than in England and the differences are really
dramatic," said study co-author Dr. Michael Marmot, an
epidemiologist at University College London in England.
>
> ....The upper crust in both countries was healthier than middle-
class and low-income people in the same country. But richer
Americans' health status resembled the health of the low-income
British.
>
> The researchers are careful to say that their study doesn't prove
that Britain's healthcare system is better than America's --
something that would be nearly impossible to demonstrate
conclusively with a study like this in any case. But that's not the
point. The point is that it's obviously not worse even though the
British spend about half as much as we do per capita.
>
> So here's the deal: under the British system, you don't have to
worry about which doctors your HMO allows you to see. You don't have
to worry about losing coverage if you get laid off. You don't have
to worry about being unable to get a new job because you have a pre-
existing condition. You don't have to worry about being bankrupted
if you contract a serious chronic illness. And large corporations
don't have to worry about going out of business because of spiraling
healthcare obligations.
>
> And the result of all this? Healthcare that's as good as ours and
delivered for about half the cost. Under a national healthcare
system, when you get sick, all you have to worry about is getting
well. Explain to me again why we're afraid of this?
>