Thanks for the extra ‘dose’ of positive feedback from last week’s Tip.

I’m emboldened then to make this additional point, possibly at risk of being labeled a sycophant for the status quo in health care.

I'm decidedly not!

It’s been noted for years, often while making the case for a Single Payer System, how poorly ‘we’ fare compared to European models.

So was ‘my’ story about the surgical miracle of separating co-jointed twins a cherry-picked anomaly?

Well, consider these cancer statistics (from The Lancet Oncology):

• Overall, the five year survival rate for men in America is 66%; in Europe, 47%
• For women, it’s 63% and 56%, respectively
• There’s a 90% survival rate for five cancers in the U.S.; skin (melanoma), breast, prostate, thyroid & testicular.

Less objective health care ratings focus on measures like quality, access, efficiency, equity and - in a nation where many are prone to “shoot up, drink up and eat up” - healthy lives!

To repeat; reign in the cost of health care and we’d excel on these subjective measures, too.

Which would do more than anything else to change the trajectory of employer and employee health insurance expenditures, nicely graphed HERE.