Mortality Rate vs Survival Rate

Aaron Carroll, Zombie arguments defending the US healthcare system:

There’s a new Commonwealth Study that ranks the US [healthcare system] pretty poorly. Nothing new there. Nothing new to some of ways that people defend the US. So let’s dispense with them in rapid fashion…

He makes three points, one of which is that when evaluating the effectiveness of a country’s healthcare system mortality rates (mortality rate = deaths per year per 100,000 people for a specified illness) are a better measure than N-year survival rates (survival rate = the probability that you’ll be alive N years after diagnosis).  It’s not that survival rates are irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, just that they’re not a good measure of how effective a healthcare system is.   Here’s his explanation for why mortality rates are more relevant than survival rates: