Healthcare Triage: Survival vs. Mortality Rates...(What's it really mean?)

The latest episode of Healthcare Triage.

As many of our readers are middle aged, we're (as a group) starting to get diagnosed with more and more conditions and diseases. If you've followed Reasonable Conversation, you know we devote a lot of our attention on healthcare reform and policy. We've all heard the terms "Survival Rates" and "Mortality Rates" tossed around, but what do they mean and what's the difference. As we get older, its going to be useful to understand how the terms are most often used, what they tell us and how politicians often mis-ise them to make their political points.

 The preview from Healthcare Triage:

 Almost every time someone wants to proclaim the US to be the "best in the world" in health care, they point to survival rates. Those refer to the percent of people who live a certain amount of time after they've been diagnosed with a disease. But there are real problems in using survival rates to compare the quality of care across systems. The metric people should be using is mortality rates. And when we compare mortality rates, we don't look nearly as good. Why is this important? Glad you asked. We answer in this week's episode.

 

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