Waiting Times: 40% of Swedes In One County Can't Even Contact Their Local Clinic By Phone When Ill
SWEDEN--Health Minister Göran Hägglund publicly criticized the lack of progress made toward shortening wait times in Sweden’s health system.
He made the comments in an opinion article in which he stated that the $39 million spent by the government on lowering wait times has apparently had little effect. The criticism comes in response to a report by the National Board of Health and Welfare showing that nearly 45% of patients have longer wait times than are supposedly guaranteed by the healthcare system.
Wait times for service were also found to vary greatly from one county to another. In Jämtland county, for example, four out of ten patients couldn’t even get through to their local clinic by telephone on the day they become ill.
Just wondering: How long would Domino's Pizza, Northwest Airlines or Dell Computer stay in business if four out of ten customers couldn't get through by phone when they wanted to order a pizza, an airline ticket or a computer?
7 Comments:
I just thank God that I live in America and when universal health care comes to our country all Americans will have the best health care in the world because we know how to do it right!
Anon ... Unless you're being sarcastic, you've missed the point. We "do it right" because it's driven (mostly) by a free market. Universal health care would destroy the free market and therefore likely the high quality of health care we have today.
Yet they live longer than us. Hmmm.
I'm able to communicate with you without picking up the phone. hmmm.
"Yet they live longer than us"...
Do they?
I'm guessing the Swedes don't have this problem to drive the aveage age at death down...
Infant mortality in the US? Could it be a scam?
The "life expectancy" myth debunked:
The problem is that life expectancy and infant mortality tell us very little about the quality of a health care system. Life expectancy is determined by a host of factors over which a health care system has little control, such as genetics, crime rate, gross domestic product per capita, diet, sanitation, and literacy rate.
The primary reason is that the U.S. has lower life expectancy is that we are ethnically a far more diverse nation than most other industrialized nations. Factors associated with different ethnic backgrounds -- culture, diet, etc. -- can have a substantial impact on life expectancy.
A good deal of the lower life expectancy rate in the U.S. is accounted for by the difference in life expectancy of African-Americans versus other populations in the United States. Life expectancy for African-Americans is about 72.3 years, while for whites it is about 77.7 years. What accounts for the difference? Numerous scholars have investigated this question. The most prevalent explanations are differences in income and personal risk factors. For example, one study found that about one-third of the difference between white and African-American life expectancies in the United States was accounted for by income; another third was accounted for by personal risk factors such as obesity, blood pressure, alcohol intake, diabetes, cholesterol concentration, and smoking and the final third was due to unexplained factors.
The link has much more, if you're intererested.
The more succesful a nation, the fatter its citizens become, and this drives down life span. That has nothing to do with health care.
Hey Alex, thanks for that most excellent link...
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