Donald Trump is accelerating America’s retreat from the world stage, illuminating our national flaws and demonstrating the contradictions between our aspirations and our performance.
Let’s be honest: a nation that could elect this ignorant, unstable man is a nation seriously in decline. If we are really prepared to be honest, we will also concede that America’s social and racial divisions, extremes of inequality and lack of anything approaching an adequate social safety-net aren’t exactly attributes that confer bragging rights, either.
A prime example is our overpriced and underperforming health care system, which our Congressional overlords are eager to make even worse. How long can intellectually dishonest pundits and politicians keep a straight face while peddling the myth that American medical care is “the best in the world”–that “we’re number one”?
The truth is that, if you are very wealthy or have exceptionally good insurance, you can get extremely good care for serious illnesses in the United States. If you don’t fall into one of those categories, not so much. And if you are an average American with a treatable ailment–or an ailment that should be treatable– your prospects are even worse.
Over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton reports on yet another in a long line of studies ranking national healthcare systems.
A new study that looks at the effects of highly treatable diseases, ones for which greater access to continual medical care can mean the difference between life and death, finds that the American health care system lags behind much of the developed world.
There are a number of ways to evaluate healthcare systems, but if you are measuring outcomes over a country’s population, rather than touting cutting-edge therapies available only to the privileged few, the U.S. has long lagged other industrialized countries.
Christopher Murray, a researcher at the University of Washington, and his collaborators looked at 32 causes of death in 195 countries from 1990 to 2015 to create a health-care quality index they used for rankings. Murray described the findings as “disturbing.”
“Having a strong economy does not guarantee good health care,” he said. “Having great medical technology doesn’t, either. We know this because people are not getting the care that should be expected for diseases with established treatments.”…
As might be expected, many highly developed nations, such as Norway, Australia and Canada, scored well. Those in more-remote areas in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean scored poorly…
The United States measures well for diseases preventable by vaccines, such as diphtheria and measles, but it gets almost failing grades for nine other conditions that can lead to death. These are lower respiratory infections, neonatal disorders, non-melanoma skin cancer, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, ischemic heart disease, hypertensive heart disease, diabetes, chronic kidney disease and the adverse effects of medical treatment itself.
The United States spends enormously more for medical care than any other country–twice as much per capita has the next most expensive system. We just spend our dollars in the least efficient ways possible: multiple non-standard insurance forms, laws that prohibit government agencies from negotiating drug prices, and private insurers whose high overhead costs include everything from marketing to sky-high management salaries and corporate jets. (Medicare’s overhead runs about 3% in contrast to 24-26% for private insurance companies.)
Obamacare is far from perfect (what we really need is “Medicare for All”), but its passage did represent a move in the right direction–and an acknowledgement that access to healthcare is a human right, not a consumer good to be made available only to those with sufficient disposable income. But rather than working to improve it with “fixes” that are fairly simple and obvious, the White House and the Congressional GOP consistently sabotage it, most recently by threatening to end crucial Affordable Care Act payments to insurers. Politico has reported on the move, and the fact that it would guarantee huge premium increases, the withdrawal of insurers from the O-Care markets, and generally cause chaos across the individual health insurance marketplace.
It’s enough to make you think American policymakers put a higher priority on the bottom lines of Big Pharma and Big Insurance than they do on the health of average citizens.
But then, what do we expect when we elect people so corrupt and self-serving they don’t even care about the health of the planet their children and grandchildren will inherit?
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