Realizan un segundo trasplante de cara en Francia

Fue operado un joven que sufría un mal incurable que deforma el rostro.

Las fotos, primicia de El Opinador:

Antes

Después

Lo primero es la salud

Más sobre un tema que me interesan mucho, los sistemas de salud. Tema complicado, creo que no hay un sistema perfecto ni soluciones mágicas. Pero si hay algo que me queda muy claro en relación a todo esto es que la solución pasa por más mercado y libertad y menos estado e intervencionismo.

Este es el punto de vista de Milton Friedman en Hoover, muy interesante:

The high cost and inequitable character of our medical care system are the direct result of our steady movement toward reliance on third-party payment. A cure requires reversing course, reprivatizing medical care by eliminating most third-party payment, and restoring the role of insurance to providing protection against major medical catastrophes.

The ideal way to do that would be to reverse past actions: repeal the tax exemption of employer-provided medical care; terminate Medicare and Medicaid; deregulate most insurance; and restrict the role of the government, preferably state and local rather than federal, to financing care for the hard cases. However, the vested interests that have grown up around the existing system, and the tyranny of the status quo, clearly make that solution not feasible politically. Yet it is worth stating the ideal as a guide to judging whether proposed incremental changes are in the right direction.

Las maravillas del sistema socializado de salud d…

Las maravillas del sistema socializado de salud de Canadá. La situación varía según la provincia pero de acuerdo a encuestas a nivel nacional, más del 60% de las personas en el país no tienen médico de familia.

En estos días se armó un revuelo fenomenal a nivel nacional cuando una señora en Granby, cerca de Montreal, tuvo que poner un aviso en el diario ofreciendo 200 dólares por consulta para encontrar un doctor. Por supuesto, por ese precio ya encontró dos.

Vuelvo a insistir con lo que vengo diciendo por acá. Sólo hay dos formas de asignar recursos, los precios o la escasez. Aparentemente, para mucha gente la escasez es la opción más progresista y con mayor “sensibilidad social”.

Este parece ser un libro interesante sobre el te…

Este parece ser un libro interesante sobre el tema estado-salud. Acá el review de Stephen Moore en el WSJ:

- About 10 years ago, I broke my leg playing basketball. After I came out of surgery, with a cast stretching from my ankle to the top of my leg, an orderly asked me whether I had ever used crutches before. I hadn’t, so he showed me what to do, swinging through them from one end of the room to the other. The whole lesson lasted about 90 seconds. When I got my hospital bill, I saw that I had been charged $150 for “gait training on crutches.” I did what all insured Americans do: I forwarded the bill to my insurance company. Why should I care? I wasn’t paying for it. One of the problems with American health care, as David Gratzer notes in “The Cure,” is precisely a payment system that takes the patient out of the equation. In the early 1960s, the average American paid out of pocket one of every two dollars that he spent on health care; today the figure is one dollar in seven. The inevitable effect is hugely wasteful spending (and inflated hospital bills like mine).

- Dr. Gratzer, a physician from Canada and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is painfully aware, thanks to Canada’s single-payer government system, of how inefficient and limited health care can be when the market is kept almost completely out of the calculation. He has seen the effects firsthand. In Canada, the average wait between a doctor visit and prescribed surgery is 17 weeks. American patients are twice as likely as Canadians to get life-saving treatments like dialysis, three times more likely to get a coronary bypass and four times more likely to get coronary angioplasty. The survival rate for leukemia, breast cancer, colon cancer and heart disease is much higher if you are treated in a U.S. hospital than in a Canadian one or, for that matter, in a European one.

- For some, including Dr. Gratzer, the costs are breathtaking, too, even when they are corrected for the payment dysfunctions that he analyzes so well. Are we suffering from a kind of runaway health-care inflation, as Dr. Gratzer at times suggests? Perhaps. But it can easily be argued that medicine, because it is subject to hyper-technological change, is hard to gauge by traditional inflation measures. The current treatments for disease aren’t really comparable with those of a quarter-century ago. To complain about the cost of heart surgery or cancer treatment by comparing it to the inflation-adjusted price in the 1960s or ’70s is to miss the point: You died 30 years ago, and you live today. The cost of my leg surgery would have been a lot cheaper in the 1960s, but I wouldn’t be able to play tennis or even run after the surgical repair was done, as I can now. How much is it worth to a family with a child who has leukemia to be able to treat her and give her a full life? The families I know who have seen their children recover say that they would have given up everything they own for today’s miracle cures. Yet it’s become a great American pastime for patients and politicians to whine about the “high cost of drugs” and other treatments that save lives.

Sistema de salud

Desde hace un tiempo vengo comentando por acá sobre los problemas del sistema de salud socializado de Canadá. Si bien es cierto que la gente no se muere por la calle, el sistema tiene serios problemas relacionados principalmente con las listas de espera, calidad y financiamiento.

A tal punto que a mediados de 2005 se conoció un muy duro fallo de la Suprema Corte de Canadá que básicamente dice que el acceso a una lista de espera no equivale a acceso al sistema de salud. Este fallo abre la puerta a las prestaciones de salud por parte de operadores privados en Québec.

Con mucha sorpresa hoy leo que hay encuestas que indican que alrededor del 60% de la población de la provincia estaría de acuerdo con la existencia de un sistema privado para los que estén dispuestos a pagarlo, siempre y cuando se mantenga el sistema actual “gratuito y universal”. Es más, por lo que leo, los habitantes de Québec demuestran un grado de apoyo más alto que otras provincias del país. ¿Qué me cuentan?:

A Leger Marketing poll sponsored by the Montreal Economic Institute reveals that Quebecers are significantly more favourable than the average Canadian to the emergence of a private health care system parallel to the current universal public system.

Sixty percent of Quebecers – compared to just 48% of all Canadians – “would agree if the government allowed faster access to health care for those who wish to pay for this health care in the private sector, while maintaining the current free and universal system.”
Openness to the private sector’s contribution to health is also strong among residents of the Atlantic provinces (59%) and Prairies (61%).

Ontarians are the most opposed to such a change (59%).