Don't Get Sick in Great Britain

It’s always fun to remind ourselves of the wit and wisdom of Paul Krugman. The famed economist and New York Times columnist once famously said that all the horror stories about health care in Once-Great Britain were lies. You see, Britain’s National Health Service is the role model for American socialists, real and aspiring.

They believe that the money will never run out, that everyone will have the best health care … if only the government becomes the primary provider. Of course, this is absurd. The truth of the matter is, someone always pays. If the money runs out, the care runs out.

Such is life. Such is economics.

Today the Yale Alumni Magazine offers this sobering assessment of the way the British NHS treats lung cancer. The inescapable conclusion is: if you come down with lung cancer, don’t get treated in Once-Great Britain. If you understand, as noted yesterday, that alternative medicine can facilitate your demise from cancer, so will the NHS.

The Yale magazine reports:

No matter what country you call home, lung cancer is a grim diagnosis—but it’s worse in England. Epidemiologists have known since the early 2000s that English people with lung cancer die sooner than patients in other European countries. But it hasn’t been clear what accounts for these differences, so Yale medicine and epidemiology professor Cary Gross teamed up with British and Italian colleagues to take a closer look. They examined American and British databases of elders who had had non-small cell lung cancer in a recent four-year period.

No matter how you look at the problem, from the perspective of diagnosis or treatment, things are worse in Once-Great Britain:

At every step, they found, English patients’ lung cancers get less attention than US patients’ do. They are diagnosed later. Cases are less often confirmed via biopsy or categorized into a stage. British patients get less chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery than their American counterparts. One-year survival in the UK is 29 percent; here, it’s 40 percent.

That’s a significant survival differential. Your odds of surviving drop significantly if you receive socialized medical care:

The differences are encapsulated in a ratio: for every 1,000 elderly English lung-cancer patients, 246 survive to the two-year mark, compared with 344 in the United States—98 more deaths. (The results appeared online in Journal of Thoracic Oncology.) The study wasn’t designed to uncover the reasons behind these disparities, but the researchers have some guesses. Coauthor Mick Peake of University College London wrote in an e-mail that, in the United States, “culturally people are more likely to demand or accept a radical treatment whereas in the UK many older people take a more fatalistic view.”

I like that last touch. The British, what with their stiff upper lips, have adapted to the situation. If they get lung cancer they know that their odds of surviving are slim, so they adapt to the system and become fatalistic. It’s not quite the same as death panels, but it’s self-selected palliative care. Apparently, it’s all the Brits can afford.