Yet More on Excess Deaths

Our friends at the Center for Evidence Based Medicine in the UK have been tracking the excess deaths issue for sometime.  This post summarizes much of their work and provides an update.  As they note, it appears that much of the excess death question revolves around increased deaths at home particularly for cardiovascular disease.  As in the US, a lot of needed care was missed.  In the UK, the nature of the government run health care and health insurance system exacerbated the issue.  Ambulance response times were delayed, hospital waiting lists for important procedures lengthened, in many cases to over a year, and many others had missed evidence-based care.  Government at work.  In the US timeliness of care was sometimes an issue, but more relevant was the terror campaign that made people fearful to seek needed care, whether scheduled or in response to some symptom.   (TTE Post)