American Sick Care Vs. Wellness - Swans
14.06.09
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I recall researching and writing a pretty depressing Scorecard for America in 2004 in which I compared among other issues the health care systems of four countries -- the U.S., Cuba, France, and Israel. Healthcare expenditures in the U.S. in the late 1990s were about 14 percent of GDP. They have now grown to almost 18 percent. In 2007, over 60 percent of personal bankruptcies were triggered by medical expenses that people could not cover. Uninsured or underinsured families are ballooning. Americans spend far more per capita than any other "advanced" country and yet the World Health Organization ranks the U.S. 37th in terms of health performance. Whether it is infant mortality, life expectancy, and all other measurements, the U.S. is far behind the rest of the Western world. While the Obama administration is trying to overhaul the health care delivery system, as President Clinton tried in 1993, we are once again being treated with commercials (remember Harry and Louise?) and rhetorical rants that depict any serious change to the status quo as a march toward dreaded socialism, long waiting lines, and rationed medicine. Public solutions are fought tooth and nail (and mucho greenbacks and lobbying) by entrenched for-profit interests -- the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance companies, the medical equipment suppliers, and a small slice of the medical profession that benefits from the fee-for-service payment model and is represented by the American Medical Association. That a plurality of the American polity, the medical doctors, and the nurses favors and asks for a single-payer system is snubbed by a majority of our lawmakers. Such a system is "off the table."
Source: Swans, CA
