U.S. A. Ranks Last In Preventable Death Rankings

I know I seem to be beating a dead horse at times, but the obscene hypocrisy of the Republican Party - that wraps itself in religiosity time and time again - in the context of opposing health care reform is more than I can stand at times. A new study that compares the number of preventable deaths - i.e., deaths that could have been avoided - had preventive health care services been available ranks the USA dead last out of 19 industrial nations. Which country comes in first? France, the country the GOP and the Christianist Kool-Aid drinkers in the GOP base love to malign and denigrate. According to the study, the USA experiences over 100,000 avoidable deaths every year because of the broken health care system that treats citizens as disposable trash. The figures are an indictment of the GOP and the conservative Christians who back its foul policies. I cannot help but think that from the GOP perspective since many of those dying needlessly are poor and/or minorities, the deaths simply do not matter. Just like LGBT lives don't matter to this modern day Pharisees. Here are highlights from Reuters:

France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday.

If the U.S. health care system performed as well as those of those top three countries, there would be 101,000 fewer deaths in the United States per year, according to researchers writing in the journal Health Affairs.

Researchers Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine tracked deaths that they deemed could have been prevented by access to timely and effective health care, and ranked nations on how they did. They called such deaths an important way to gauge the performance of a country's health care system.

In establishing their rankings, the researchers considered deaths before age 75 from numerous causes, including heart disease, stroke, certain cancers, diabetes, certain bacterial infections and complications of common surgical procedures.Such deaths accounted for 23 percent of overall deaths in men and 32 percent of deaths in women, the researchers said.

France did best -- with 64.8 deaths deemed preventable by timely and effective health care per 100,000 people, . . . . The United States had 109.7 such deaths per 100,000 people, the researchers said.

After the top three, Spain was fourth best, followed in order by Italy, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, Greece, Austria, Germany, Finland, New Zealand, Denmark, Britain, Ireland and Portugal, with the United States last.

The GOP and its Christianist base love to bloviate about the USA being a "Christian nation" - not according to these results. Rather than emulating the Good Samaritan, the Christianists act like the priest and Levite in the Gospel parable. If these folks are "Christians," then I want nothing to do with that moniker.