And that's the essence of this: In the developed world, this is all but a US specific issue. Cancer and other life threatening diseases rarely bankrupt Europeans, Canadians, Australians, Kiwis, Japanese etc.
You can keep a lot of your assets, generally including your retirement accounts, at least some equity in your home, your car, your personal property. Your credit is badly dinged and you'll have trouble borrowing money for a while, but even that is only a temporary setback.
I know people who have gone through it, in once case more than once, and at least from appearances they have a pretty normal lifestyle.
The recovery from a bankruptcy is probably a walk in the park compared to recovery from cancer (not speaking from experience). Ultimately it's just money.
Sure, but they're also dramatically less likely to survive the cancer than Americans are at a population level. There have been multiple long-term studies on cancer survival rates that have demonstrated this.
And it's notoriously difficult to compare. If cancer is registered as "discovered" early, because a for profit doctor starts treating it early, but the government hired doctor maybe doesn't, the early treated will statistically appear as living longer.
First, you're posting data that isn't relevant: that's the rate of cancer incidence, not the survival rates. That says nothing about how well the cancer is treated.
Secondly, it's nonsensical to compare aggregated cancer statistics between countries, because the demographics vary drastically, many cancer risk factors are highly hereditary, and the survival rates for different types of cancers vary so dramatically.
If you look at the actual survival rates, once adjusted for racial composition and type of cancer, the US comes out far ahead. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18639491
2. The data is talking about 5 year survival rates and not actual survival. The US Healthcare system is great at keeping people alive who should have stopped treatment long ago.
3. The US is behind on every other major health indicator, Infant Mortality, Life Expectancy, Cardiovascular Disease, Obesity etc. Cancer isn't the only expensive illness in the US.
This thread is overrun with Astroturfers.
It's from a study published 10 years ago. The study was repeated more recently and republished less than a year ago, reaffirming the original results.
> 2. The data is talking about 5 year survival rates and not actual survival. The US Healthcare system is great at keeping people alive who should have stopped treatment long ago.
There is no such thing as "actual survival". 5-year survival rates are the global standard for cancer epidemiology.
> 3. The US is behind on every other major health indicator, Infant Mortality, Life Expectancy, Cardiovascular Disease, Obesity etc. Cancer isn't the only expensive illness in the US.
This thread is about cancer, in response to an article posted about cancer.
> This thread is overrun with Astroturfers.
From the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Please don't impute astroturfing or shillage. That degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about it, email us and we'll look at the data.
If so, it is possible for two countries that have the same survival rate measured from actual onset of the cancer to have a different 5 year survival rate.
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/cancer-survival...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_quality_o...
It's worrying that the US places so much emphasis on 5 year survival rates, and not on eg all cause mortality.
I'm not, if you actually read the research I linked instead of speculating.
This causes people to get tested, get treated, and sometimes get harmed by that treatment, but does not extend their life.
This is discussed and addressed in each of the three instances of the study that have been conducted, so I recommend reading those for the response.