EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF -- The US Healthcare System -- October 20, 2020

 

The US Healthcare System

By LARRY ROMANOFF – October 20, 2020

 

Just as with the quality of US education, most of what you are told about the superiority of the American medical system is just false propaganda and brand marketing. The US spends more than twice as much as any other Western nation on a health care system widely considered to be the most dysfunctional in the developed world and where, in spite of the doubled total costs, much of the population has no access to health care. Many studies have demonstrated that the US has an enormous number of preventable deaths each year solely due to the dysfunctional nature of its health care system. The most credible estimate was a study carried out by Harvard Medical School Professors Himmelstein and Woolhandler in 1997, which concluded that about 100,000 people died in the United States each year because of lack of needed care. (1) (2) (3) And statistics confirm that an additional 50,000 Americans die each year while waiting for critical treatment because they have no insurance. (4) But these numbers, large as they are, are trivial compared to those of the patients who die after being admitted to American hospitals. Read on.

In the United States today, life expectancy is 50th in the world - just above Albania, and infant mortality 46th in the world - worse than Slovenia, in all cases far below all developed nations and far below China as well. Of 17 high-income countries studied by the National Institutes of Health in 2013, the US had the highest prevalence of infant mortality, heart and lung disease, sexually transmitted infections, adolescent pregnancies, injuries, homicides, and disabilities. Together, these issues place the US at the bottom of the list for life expectancy. (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) In 2000, the World Health Organization (WHO) performed an extensive study of health care systems in about 200 nations. (12) (13) In that study, the US health care system was ranked as the highest in cost, 37th in overall performance, and 72nd by overall level of health. Another study by The Commonwealth Fund ranked the United States by far the lowest in quality of health care among all similar countries, and by far the most expensive. The Health Affairs journal performed a study in 2000, where it found that since 1970 all other nations had gained about six more years of life expectancy than did the US. According to the WHO and The Commonwealth Fund, the US spent more on health care per capita, and more on health care as percentage of its GDP, than any other nation in 2011, but ranked last in the quality of health care.

EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF -- The US Healthcare System -- October 20, 2020

 

The US Healthcare System

 

By LARRY ROMANOFF – October 20, 2020

 

Just as with the quality of US education, most of what you are told about the superiority of the American medical system is just false propaganda and brand marketing. The US spends more than twice as much as any other Western nation on a health care system widely considered to be the most dysfunctional in the developed world and where, in spite of the doubled total costs, much of the population has no access to health care. Many studies have demonstrated that the US has an enormous number of preventable deaths each year solely due to the dysfunctional nature of its health care system. The most credible estimate was a study carried out by Harvard Medical School Professors Himmelstein and Woolhandler in 1997, which concluded that about 100,000 people died in the United States each year because of lack of needed care. (1) (2) (3) And statistics confirm that an additional 50,000 Americans die each year while waiting for critical treatment because they have no insurance. (4) But these numbers, large as they are, are trivial compared to those of the patients who die after being admitted to American hospitals. Read on.

 

 

In the United States today, life expectancy is 50th in the world - just above Albania, and infant mortality 46th in the world - worse than Slovenia, in all cases far below all developed nations and far below China as well. Of 17 high-income countries studied by the National Institutes of Health in 2013, the US had the highest prevalence of infant mortality, heart and lung disease, sexually transmitted infections, adolescent pregnancies, injuries, homicides, and disabilities. Together, these issues place the US at the bottom of the list for life expectancy. (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) In 2000, the World Health Organization (WHO) performed an extensive study of health care systems in about 200 nations. (12) (13) In that study, the US health care system was ranked as the highest in cost, 37th in overall performance, and 72nd by overall level of health. Another study by The Commonwealth Fund ranked the United States by far the lowest in quality of health care among all similar countries, and by far the most expensive. The Health Affairs journal performed a study in 2000, where it found that since 1970 all other nations had gained about six more years of life expectancy than did the US. According to the WHO and The Commonwealth Fund, the US spent more on health care per capita, and more on health care as percentage of its GDP, than any other nation in 2011, but ranked last in the quality of health care.

 

 

The root cause is a Right-Wing political conviction that government need not finance social needs which it claims are better looked after by the private sector, but the real reason is more commercial than ideological - the determination of a few wealthy industrialists to access the massive health care revenue stream. Due to extensive lobbying and virtual control by private-interest groups, the US government has largely abandoned medical services to the private sector, leaving corporations to provide society's social needs on a profit-maximisation basis. There are of course huge conflicts of interest when private corporations driven primarily by profit and self-interest are responsible for the delivery of a fundamental social need. The two major manifestations of this capitalist approach are that (a) much of the medical services field in the US, including hospitals and medical offices, are operated as for-profit businesses rather than being part of the social infrastructure of the nation as they are in Canada and Europe, and (b) the involvement of insurance companies as profiteering middlemen. This is one of the factors exacerbating the nation's increasing income disparity. The insertion of private profiteers into public services serves only to drain wealth from the general public and concentrate it into increasingly fewer hands rather than recycling it through the government and overall population.