For years, I've heard people claim that, healthcare is expensive in the US because it's higher quality. Finally, the MSM - even the business press - is catching that the mantra "we have the best healthcare in the world" is simply not true. Indeed, many independent analysts conclude that in the US we not only pay twice as much for care - on most measures, we get just about the worst care in the industrialized world. Yesterday, a new article came out in Businessweek that confirms this once again.
Please, Kossacks: Get this message out. Many conservatives believe that the problems in the healthcare system - like many other social problems - are just another example of "other people" having problems because they're just lazy and don't have good jobs with health insurance. They believe that it's necessary that some people have no access to care, in order for the free market to work and provide us with "the best healthcare in the world." We need to get the message out: the facts show that this simply isn't true.
See those facts on the flip
The
BusinessWeek article does a great job of laying out the facts:
The U.S. health-care system is doing poorly by virtually every measure. ... [The report] gave the U.S. system low grades on outcomes, quality of care, access to care, and efficiency, compared to other industrialized nations or generally accepted standards of care. Bottom line: U.S. health care barely passes with an overall grade of 66 out of 100.
The survey was carried out by 18 academic and private-sector health-care leaders, who rate the system on 37 different measures.
Here are some of the highlights:
The U.S. ranks at the bottom among industrialized countries for life expectancy both at birth and at age 60. It is also last on infant mortality, with 7 deaths per 1,000 live births, compared with 2.7 in the top three countries.
This is, of course, on top of the tremendous sacrifice in healthcare access and dollars that we make in the name of the "free" market:
*One-third of all adults under 65 have problems paying their medical bills or have medical debt they are paying over time.
And here's the key thing: we don't get close to what we pay for:
The poor grade is particularly discomfiting, the researchers note, because the U.S. spends more on medicine, by far, than any other country. ...
Maybe this is one of the reasons:
*As a share of total health expenditures, insurance administrative costs in the U.S. were more than three times the rate in countries with integrated payment systems.
The authors concluded that, if the U.S. improved and standardized health-care performance and access, approximately 100,000 to 150,000 lives could be saved annually, along with $50 billion to $100 billion a year.
Kossacks already know this, of course - the problems in quality of care have been blogged before
Defenders of American healthcare say that the United States has the best healthcare in the world. This is not true. We don't have the best healthcare in the world, we have the most expensive healthcare in the world.
and we've seen many articles such as this:
If we had a rate as good as Singapore's, we would save 18,900 babies each year.
But finally the MSM - the business press, no less - is starting to acknowledge the simple facts. That means it's time for us to double our efforts to get the word out: the system is so broke that it's hurting everyone, and no, we don't get what we pay for.