Oklahoma Ranks DEAD Last in Health Care!!

[okclee]

Interactive: U.S. Health Care, State by State - Newsweek Health - MSNBC.com

Newsweek - Oklahoma ranks 50 out of 50 states in the US in health care.

Why is it that Oklahoma always has to be at or near the bottom in health related issues??

[John]

I think they have a little anti-south thing going on...

[HOT ROD]

I wouldn't get too fired up in the panties about this, look at most large/populated states are red - so it is probably more of an indication about access or lack thereof rather than the health care system in OK or other populated states are poor.

[SuperScooper]

Probably because our state does not dump a large chunk of money into free public health care. Not to mention there is not a charity hospital or an abundance of free clinics like there are in other states.

The one thing that disturbs me about health care is the fact that most Americans want excellent health care at cheap prices. While at the same time they refuse to follow preventative measures recommend by their doctors and health advocates.

[NE Oasis]

Most of the categories listed in the survey data involve personal choices, not "evil empire" health care companies nor heavy handed government agencies. If Oklahomans, based on that criteria, avoid doctors and spend thier health care dollars in other areas so be it.

[Kerry]

The Commwealth Fund that paid for the study is pushing government funded universal health care. This probably explains several things. First, this is why the NE rated so high (they have extensive public support health care). Second, the choice of blue for best and red for worst coincides with red and blue representations for Republican and Democrat voting states. Third, this is why it appears in Newsweek/MSNBC.

If you don't think this "survey" is politically motivated your nuts.

Here is the funny part:
Disclaimer on the report
Support for this research was provided by The Commonwealth Fund. The views presented here are those of the authors and not necessarily those of The Commonwealth Fund or its directors, officers, or staff, or of The Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System or its members.

Here is who wrote the report:
"The differences we found between the top and bottom states were shocking, often a two- to three-fold variation or greater," said co-author and Commonwealth Fund Senior Vice President Cathy Schoen.

Here is who testified before congress:
Our nation's failure to provide adequate health insurance to millions is a major factor in the inconsistent performance of the nation's health system, testified Commonwealth Fund vice president Sara Collins, Ph.D., before the United States Senate.

I thought the report didn't represent the view of The Commonwealth Fund

[SuperScooper]

I can just see Universal Health Care in action now.

I am bleeding like a stuck pig because I was just injured in a car crash. Hospitals 1,2,3 and are on divert status because its Flu season. (Why would you spend $30 at Walgreens and treat yourself at home when the local hospital is free.)

EMSA rushes me to a hospital number 4 (which is 30 minutes away) just so I can die in the Ambulance Bay.

Before we jump the gun and create another goverment money pit, how about we learn to live healthy lifestyles, learn basic first aid, demand responsable pricing for health services and allow reasonable repayment plans. Those simple steps alone will save consumers and taxpayers millions.

[okclee]

Does anyone plan on seeing the Michael Moore movie, that shows all of the problems in the US heathcare system, "Sicko"???

MichaelMoore.com : SiCKO : 'SiCKO' News : 'Sicko' to open early in New York

[Karried]

I plan on seeing it.. I can't wait. Health care is so outrageous. And horribly frightening to think of something catastrophic happening without proper insurance.

[jbrown84]

You know it's bull sh** when Texas is #49.

[SoonerDave]

I love these self-serving, inflammatory "studies" that end up becoming "news."

Without even looking at the "study," I'm going to make this wild guess that it's primarily based on how much free (translated: government-paid) medical care each state provides.

There are manifest problems with health care, but "studies" and "news" like this doesn't help them.

-soonerdave

[jbrown84]

Gotta love the headline:

"Don't Get Sick in Tulsa"

Like if you get sick there, there are no hospitals or something.

[okclee]

Here are a few other rankings with Okc near or at the bottom in health related categories.

The Best & Worst Cities for Men 2007 - Men's Health - MSN Health & Fitness Oklahoma City ranks near the worst at 92 out of 100.

Metrogrades: Ranking America's Cities - Men's Health - MSN Health & Fitness Oklahoma City ranks worst at #98 out of 100.

The Fast-food capital of America: Oklahoma City - Apr. 12, 2007 We all know this one Okc ranks #1 as "Fast Food Capital"

The fittest and fattest cities - Fitness - MSNBC.com Here Tulsa ranks #14 as the fittest city, and Okc ranks #17 as the fattest.

The Best Walking Cities of 2007 Here we have the top 100 Best walking cities, Okc comes in at #83 out of 100.


Are all of these lists biased against Okla. or Okc??

Do they all have hidden government agendas??

[jbrown84]

No.

Those are completely different. They are saying that Oklahomans are not living healthy lifestyles, essentially. No one's arguing with that.


This list purports that our health care is of poor quality, as if we have no good doctors or nice hospitals or state of the art treatment facilities. And that is insulting and not true.

[okclee]

I think that it all goes hand in hand. If the people of Okla lived healthier then I think that you would see that our Health Care would be held in a higher regard, and we would not place 50th in the US with poor healthcare.

I have heard over the years that many of our top doctors have been leaving the state of Okla because of lack of tort reform. It was only a year or two ago that doctors of Okc had a stand in at the legislature trying to get help with malpractice suits and insurance. I don't know all of the facts but I don't think that anything has changed since then, at least I haven't heard.

[jbrown84]

The fact that Oklahomans are fat and lazy doesn't mean that are doctors suck or that our hospitals don't have the most up-to-date equipment on the market.

It's hogwash.

[okclee]

Here is another ranking, Okla. is 2nd in the U.S. behind Mississippi in Strokes.

Strokes strike South the hardest - Heart Health - MSNBC.com

[Tim]

Lee, I gotta sorta agree with jbrown here. I think we're talking apples and oranges. The partisan study bemoaning the state of our health care system has little to to with the sorry state of our health. That's like saying "If they built better cars, I would be a better driver." Our health care system is not without flaws, but I don't believe it's as bad as the report would have you believe.

[SoonerDave]

Well, only way to find out what biases may exist is to look at the foundation of the report. Let's look at the "Best Walking" cities.

Tops on the list of what makes a place "fitness walker friendly" are safe streets, beautiful places to walk, mild weather, and good air quality.

Here are some of the specific criteria we used. Each criterion was weighted as heavy, medium or light in terms of importance.

• % of pop that walks for exercise
• Use of mass transit
• Parks per square mile
• Points of interest per squre mile
• Avg winter/summer temperatures
• % of athletic shoe buyers

Let's see. "Beautiful places to walk?" Boy, that's not subjective, is it? Parks per square mile? How could an Oklahoma, with far less land area than, say, a Texas or a California, ever be successful here? "Points of interest?" What's interesting to you isn't interesting to me. More subjective criteria. "% athletic shoe buyers" - so the only "legitimate" walkers are those who pay >$100 for a Nike swoosh on the side of their sneaks? And they say only that they weight the criteria as "heavy, medium, or light," but don't tell you which they decided get what assessment.

The point isn't to villify their survey, or to say that OKC or Tulsa is or isn't a good place to walk; its to point out that I can come up with a dozen subjective criteria, plop it on a blog somewhere, and trumpet as "The 10 Most <Whatever> List," and no one can dispute me. It doesn't mean anything.

As far as this survey goes, what about "miles of sidewalk per house?" or "miles of sidewalk per capita?" Or "average discretionary time for walking" per capita? Maybe they're relevant, maybe not, but the point is that saying a given city finished low on the "walking list" doesn't mean squat.

And that famous "fast food capital" survey? Take a moment and look at how the results are couched:

Last year, well over half (55 percent) of Oklahoma City fast-food patrons dined in establishments like McDonald's or Wendy's

Note that the result is taken from a subset of the population - 55% of Oklahoma City fast-food patrons **not** the entire population. It doesn't say anything about the absolute rate of fast-food consumption or rate of visitation. Maybe the pool of fast-food patrons is higher or lower here, or there, but the point is you can't make a conclusion based on these half-baked statistics. The previous "winner" was Greenvile, South Carolina, with a gasp-inducing rate of 59%! Horrors!

But let's look into those numbers a bit more deeply. First, a "heavy user" was someone who visited a fast-food joint for "burgers and fries" more than 12 times per month. What's special about 12? What about 11? Would the statistical percentages and/or "winners" have changed if the number was changed? Is going to fast-food for burgers and fries 11 times a month suddenly considered healthy? How do OKC and Greenville's numbers compare there? Don't know, because the authors arbitrarily deemed them to be irrelevant.

Wikipedia reports that Greenville, South Carolina has a population of 75,000, and the greater Greenville metropolitan area encompases close to 207,000. Oklahoma City's population is listed at 531,324 (core), an 1.17 million (metropolitan).

Let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that 100% of the population in both cities is a "fast food customer," even though we know by the presentation of the data that's not the case. 59% of the "core" population works out to 44,000 people in Greenville, and about 292K in OKC. What we're finding out now is that we're comparing population bases that differ by a factor of about six. But since the authors chose not to tell us what those actual numbers are, we're left to draw the conclusions they intended for us to draw.

Are we the fast-food capital of the country? Only way to find that out is to determine a raw per-capita consumption rate of fast-food items. And that number is nowhere to be found in this article.

I'm not saying we do or don't consume too much fast-food. That's not the point. (I personally do not buy into the villain-food theology, but believe in moderation in all things. The idea of 12 trips to Mickey D's in 30 days makes me want to barf). The point is that we must be willing to analyze surveys for the ultimate purpose they are designed to serve.

Lastly, in that "Men's Fitness" article, they based their "fattest cities" list on things like "gym memberships" and "time spent in traffic." Heck, I'm dumb enough to believe that if you sell me a survey about "fattest cities" you've gone to the trouble of measuring average weight, standard deviations from the mean, and other statistical analyses, not my gym habits or my driving tendencies. I could be a member of 3 gyms and never visit them, and I could commute to-and-from work 100 miles a day but still run 5 miles every night. The point is that the criteria are arbitrary and meaningless, and the points of each predetermined. Men's Fitness wants men to lose weight; that's great. So what if I live in a city they think is "fat?" The Commonwealth group wants socialized medicine, so they put out a survey about "worst" health care. Someone wants to blame TV ads for making kids fat, so they release a study that shows a correlation, but not a causation and since no one bothers to understand the difference, some people start running around like a headless chicken thinking we suddenly have to "do" something about TV ads - completely igorning the fact that TV ads have zero calories.

Sorry to rant on about this, but I get so tired of junk science, junk surveys, and manipulated statistics based on arbitrary criteria that are then used to make or reinforce premediated conclusions. If you want to convince me of something as fact, give me factual, absolute research, not this claptrap our USA Today "Poll of the Day" graphic pseudeo journalistic subculture has inspired.

-soonerdave

[okclee]

Does anyone remember a year or two ago, the sit-in that local doctors had at the state capitol??

What was that all about??

If I remember correctly many of our top doctors do leave the state because it is to costly for them to practice medicine in Oklahoma.

[okclee]

2006 best hospitals list, nearly 200 listed not one from the state of Okla., again with the agenda or bias against Okla.

usnews.com: Health: Best Hospitals 2006: A-Z Hospital Index

[CuatrodeMayo]

Preach it, Brother Dave.

[okclee]

I will agree that you can make a list of rankings read however you want it to read. Just like you can with anything else, but don't you think that once maybe once Okc or Okla would make it at the top of one of the rankings or lists??

The main report took in these factors:
Access - access to health insurance
Quality - quality of care give by the medical profession
Equity - equal care based on ethnicity or income level
Hospital Costs - the expense of hospital care
Healthy Living - measures how states support their residents healthy lives

Here is our State's rankings:
Access - 50th
Quality - 43rd
Equity - 50th
Hosptial Costs - 50th
Healthy Living - 47th

[okclee]

Sooner Dave..........with all things being equal, don't you think that at least once Okc would make it out of the bottom of all of these lists and rankings??

You can throw out the fast food list or the walking cities list, but you can not throw out all of the rankings and lists as pure biased agenda.

Okla #2 in strokes
Okla not one of the top hospitals in the U.S.
Okla top diabetes state
Okla fattest cities
Okla shortest life expectancy.

Why is everyone picking on Oklahoma??

[SoonerDave]

At least USNews spelled out a rather detailed description of the methodology they used that allows the findings of their list to be discussed. That's a hopeful sign....but at the core of that discussoin, note that at the core of their survey was this:

The doctors were mailed a survey form and asked to list the five hospitals they feel are best in their specialty for difficult cases, without consideration of cost or location.

Oh, blast. You've just blown objectivity to you-know-where. We're no longer scientific, we're going on people's opinion. Doctors, yes, specialists, apparently, but still its' a "popularity" contest for about 1/3 of the survey's criteria. Was the "most popular" girl in high school really the "best" or "nicest" girl?

Look, too, at the fundamental selection criteria of a "best hospitals" list:

In individual specialties, hospitals had to admit and treat a minimum number of patients in 2002, 2003, and 2004 with sufficiently complex conditions in 2002, 2003, and 2004

This survey opts to find and celebrate hospitals that treat specialty situations particularly well - even rare ones, and that inherently puts smaller states at a disadvantage. If the occurrence rate of a particular rare cancer is reasonably distributed across the country, more populous states will have a higher incidence rate, thus hospitals in those areas will have a greater chance of being listed. There might be one, two, or ?? hospitals in Oklahoma that treated some of these "rare" conditions masterfully, but if they didn't treat what USNews decided was "enough" of them, you might as well be a guy with a knife and a bottle of disinfectant loitering outside McDonalds (after having your 12th fast-food burger and fries )

Fortunately, the lead paragraph of the story explains (in effect) that you're likely to find good, general care at your local hospital. It's a shame the list isn't entitled to reflect that sentiment, because as it is, the list is misleading, because the absence of any one hospital could merely be because it doesn't see enough of the candidate cases to qualify for rating.

This kind of list - and qualitative assessments about the "quality" of health care in Oklahoma - none of them take into account other factors, such as:

* We have one of the leading neuromuscular disease physicians groups in the country - right here in OKC
* I personally (and I recognize that personal observations do not a trend make) have had the services of a surgeon that has a sterling list of very high-profile patients (many of whom fly in to see him), and he chooses to maintain his surgical practice here in Oklahoma and use Oklahoma hospitals for some reason.
* The Dean McGee Eye Institute is a nationally recognized leader in vision research
* Oklahoma was among the first states in the country to experiment with lithotripsy in the destruction of kidney stones (Deaconness Hospital, if memory serves)

The point isn't about what few things I happen to know - it's that there are two sides to every survey. We can't allow ourselves to see two or three surveys and conclude "Oklahoma health care sucks, we're all fat, and we're all gonna die." It just isn't that simple.

Again, I'm not trashing the survey or celebrating it, I'm trying to call attention to those facts that should compel us to study the detalis of the survey to determine what is really being reported, not just what the author wants to tell us he or she is reporting, that's all. I'm a firm advocate of everyone using that paperweight between the ears - even me

-soonerdave