Despite free treatment, British health rankings decline

Britain provides a forecast for Obama's bureaucratically controlled medicine.

LONDON (Reuters) - Years of universal healthcare, rising health spending, cancer screening, immunization and anti-smoking laws have failed to stop Britain falling behind in reducing early death and disease, a study showed on Tuesday. Researchers who compared Britain's health performance since 1990 with 14 European Union countries plus Australia, Canada, Norway and the United States said its pace of decline in premature death was "persistently and significantly" behind the average - a finding they described as "startling". Chris Murray, who led the work at the University of Washington, said Britain's poor performance was partly due to dramatic increases in Alzheimer's disease and in drug and alcohol abuse problems, and to a failure to tackle leading killers such as heart disease, strokes and lung diseases. "Concerted action is urgently needed," said Murray, director of the university's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Using data from a vast study called the Global Burden of Diseases, headline findings of which were published last year, researchers analyzed patterns of ill health and death in Britain, calculated the contribution of various preventable risk factors, and ranked it among high-income countries that spent similar amounts on health in 1990 and 2010. They found that only in men older than 55 years had Britain seen significantly faster drops in death rates than other nations over the last 20 years. Britain's ranking in premature mortality rates for adults aged between 20 and 54 had "worsened substantially", they found.

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