What? European style socialist healthcare is better than the healthcare we receive in the greatest nation on earth? Well yes, yes it is. Even their rich people are healthier than our rich people, according to a study conducted by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine entitled “U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health.”
Some details were surprising: even wealthier Americans and those with health insurance were not as healthy as counterparts in other prosperous nations, it found.
“We were struck by the gravity of these findings,” said Steven Woolf, professor of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and chair of the panel that wrote the report. […]
The report is the first of its kind to look at a range of illnesses, injuries and behaviors of people of all ages in the United States to run a comparison with counterparts in rich countries such as Australia, Canada, Japan and several countries in western Europe.
Among the countries studied, the United States was in last place or close to last in nine key benchmark areas.
They were: infant mortality and low birth weight; injuries and homicides; teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections; prevalence of HIV and AIDS; drug-related deaths; obesity and diabetes; heart disease; chronic lung disease; and disability.
Something is terribly wrong in this country and has been for some time when it comes to the health and well being of our people (other than those corporate persons who get to spend as much as they want to influence our elections and the laws Congress considers). We came out of WWII and developed the most prosperous, best educated, healthiest nation on earth. But that was over sixty years ago.
Today, among our peers in the developed world, we rank as the unhealthiest nation. Coincidentally, we have the greatest income inequality in our history. During the good old days – back when “union” was not a dirty word and teachers were paid a living wage – we dramatically reduced income inequality to the lowest point in our history.
Then came Reagan, deregulation, privatization, and the rise of the for profit health care industry. Now we spend more per capita on health care than any other country in the world, and we get worse health care than our neighbor to the North, and the nations we defeated in WWII, Japan and Germany, among others. As the author of the panel that issued this report stated, this level of suffering is unnecessary. You know, when people take medical vacations to get dental care and other medical treatments in Mexico and Costa Rica because they can’t afford the cost of those services in “the land of the free and the home of the brave” – well, need I say more.
Then, there is the stress-inducing full-time job of keeping the hospitals and insurance companies somewhat honest.
I just got a bill from my local hospital for a procedure done August, 2011. No details. Just a bill. The insurance company has no information about this. The hospital calls it “an adjustment.” They promised to give me more information. They did. A notice from a collection agency.
I cannot possibly imagine the lengths one would have to go to keep up with these billings for a person with an extended illness. No wonder so many people just throw up their hands and cry “Uncle!”
Criminals all, and the wingers project government death panels. Cripes.
With that rant concluded, it is true. I have many, many friends who are traveling to Central America for medical and dental treatments. There is a whole industry of medical tourism flourishing.
PS: We’re Number One!!
I went through the same collections go round with a large hospital last summer after paying the bill, but not receiving credit for the payment, even though I have an endorsed, cancelled check. The hospital business office has shown exactly zero interest in helping me work through what was their posting error. I now have my bank working to rectify it through other means. Also considering filing a consumer complaint with the state attorney general.
The poison of privatised for profit health care has infected some European societies too, with underfunding of public healthcare forcing some better off people into the arms of the private health care and insurance industry if you want to avoid lengthy delays and get prompt treatment.
However generally no one is in any doubt that (unless you want a private hospital room in luxurious surroundings) public health care is at least as good as the private variant, and that it is every citizen’s right to receive care in accordance with their medical needs rather than their financial means.
It seems to us to be particularly barbaric – an a mark of an impoverished or corrupt third world society – for society to deny anyone the best possible health care simply because they can’t afford to pay for it. Much of our third world aid is directed at helping poorer countries similar standards.
My own brother and his wife (both senior doctors) regularly spend their (generous) annual leave and much unpaid leave besides working in Malawi and Uganda practicing medicine and teaching locals to upgrade their skills and facilities.
He also spent some years (as a junior doctor) working in Seattle and was horrified to discover that much of his clinical time was spent on the phone with insurance companies negotiating with some idiot as to what tests/procedures he could perform for his patients with their coverage.
The Irish public healthcare system has some funding issues, but he has never came across such crass inefficiency and dysfunctionality as in the US system.
Frank, that’s because the inefficiency is a feature of our system, not a bug.
No. The feature is that the primary motivation is profit rather than the optimization of health care outcomes for patients. So why should we surprised that clinical outcomes are sub-optimal whilst costs and profit margins are higher?
Personally I don’t want to go to a hospital/doctor who is structurally incentivised to favour some treatments over others based on their profitability rather than efficacy.
I have the highest regard for the professional integrity of most health car professionals, but I don’t often know them personally and so I am not often in a postion to make such a judgement.
However if I know they are financially incentivised to favour some interventions/non-interventions over others on the basis of profitability rather than medical efficacy, my default position has to be to distrust their motives/decisions unless proven otherwise.
Most patients are not in a position to second guess the clinical decisions of their carers and “shopping around” is often not an option. So the classic “free market choice” argument simply doesn’t apply to health care.
So why would you design a whole “health care” system around profit maximization rather than medical efficacy? Is that not to prioritize the financial interests of providers over the health care interests of patients often mis-characterized as “consumers”.
In political terms, it is a failure of the state to legislate in the best interests of the citizenry. it is a victory of private interests over the public good.
I appreciate that the Libertarian streak in US politics – for historical reasons – sees the state as an instrument of oppression rather than as an instrument for the promotion and vindication of human rights. But that is why we have democracy now – to ensure the state is driven by public rather than private interests.
Since when is libertarianism about being under the cosh of private interests rather than about ensuring the state vindicates human rights for all?
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Perhaps if Michael Jackson had had to go to a Socialist doctor instead of hiring his own for millions, he would still be alive. Ditto for Elvis, or at least he would have lived longer.