Canadians Have Better Health Than Americans

April 29, 2010— -- Canadians live longer and in better health than their American counterparts, researchers said.

A 19-year-old Canadian can expect 2.7 more years of "perfect health" than an American of the same age, according to David Feeny of Kaiser Permanente Northwest's Center for Health Research in Portland, Ore., and colleagues.

The difference probably arises from a combination of two factors, Feeny and colleagues said online in the journal Population Health Metrics: Canada's cradle-to-grave health insurance and lower social and economic inequality, especially among the elderly.

The finding, from a joint United States-Canada survey of health, seems certain to add fuel to the still-current debate over how recent reforms will affect health care.

"There is very substantial relevance," Feeny told MedPage Today. "I think there are some very important potential policy implications, particularly in the U.S."

The researchers analyzed data from the 2002/2003 Joint Canada/United States Survey of Health, which was conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics and Statistics Canada.

The survey, which used random-digit telephone dialing to obtain data, was described by the researchers as the first to "provide fully comparable data of health status, lifestyle, health care utilization, and other determinants of health" between the two countries.

Using the data, the researchers computed life expectancy, health-related quality of life (using an instrument dubbed Health Utilities Index Mark 3, or HUI3), and health-adjusted life expectancy for the two countries.

The health utilities index is based on eight aspects of health status -- vision, hearing, speech, ambulation dexterity, emotion, cognition, and pain and discomfort -- and each attribute has five or six levels, ranging from normal to severely disabled.

HUI3 scores range from 0.0 to 1.0 -- from dead to "perfect health," Feeny and colleagues said.

The study results are similar to other examinations of health in the two countries, Feeny said, but most previous studies were only able to compare things like life expectancy and health-related quality of life, or morbidity. The new factor here, he said, is the health-adjusted life expectancy, a measure that combines both.