The private, for-profit US healthcare system is quite destructive. Here are 8 reasons why.
Siphons off huge portions of our incomes
According to recent studies, Americans are spending as much as 10% — 25% of their incomes on healthcare, which is absolutely ridiculous. The amount we spend personally on healthcare is much greater than the taxes we would pay to finance Medicare-for-all. AARP also found that rising healthcare costs are limiting wage growth and shrinking the middle-class, in more than one way.
Here are their primary conclusions...
‘’ Employers have responded to rising health care costs by shifting more health insurance costs to employees, offering high-deductible health plans with lower premiums but higher cost sharing, and limiting wage growth.
Health-related expenses absorb a large share of incomes for people age 65 and older,and that share is projected to grow over time. The share of household income spent on health care expenses is projected to reach 18 percent for future retirees, compared to8 percent for today’s retirees.
Expenses for long-term services and supports (LTSS) are a major risk to economic security in retirement for middle-class families, since such expenses are not covered by Medicare and few people have private insurance to cover such costs.
Family caregivers providing unpaid assistance to family members needing LTSS do so at a cost to their own economic security. Of those who worked while caregiving,two-thirds made some adjustments to their employment and one in ten quit a job or took early retirement—issues that especially affect the future financial security of women, who are most often the primary caregivers.’’
Millions remain uninsured
The uninsured rate is about 12%, which is means 28 million americans are included in this camp. When someone is uninsured, they have worse access to care. How is the US for-profit system supposed to get the best outcomes when it still can’t get everybody enrolled? It can’t, and this is the advantage of having universal healthcare.
Millions remain underinsured
Even if you manage to cough-up the dough for insurance, there is no guarantee you’ll get comprehensive coverage and care. According to the Commonwealth fund, 30 million are underinsured. Some negative effects include or are associated with underinsurance are; increased trouble paying bills, higher deductibles more financial pain. Once again, in a similar fashion to the uninsured, the underinsured have worse access to care.
That’s not surprising, considering part of the for-profit, insurance business-model is to sell people the least comprehensive coverage they can while paying out as little as they can get away with. Remember, the insurance companies would loose money on almost every patient, unless they half-ass their coverage. That industry mentality, although not always directly connected to underinsurance, helps create medical bills that look like this:
This is another reason why single-payer is necessary. Nationalized insurance, rather than for-profit insurance, would pay 100% of given medical bills, rather than shifting costs elsewhere.
Throws millions into poverty
Here’s an astonishing statistic. Our extremely wasteful and expensive healthcare system throws 7 million people into poverty. This statistic was first recorded in 2014, by the American Public Health Association.
Causes hundreds of thousands of bankruptcies
Fun (or not so fun) fact, medical expenses are one of the, if not the leading cause of bankruptcy in the US. Obamacare did a good job of reducing this problem, but it remains nonetheless. Multiple studies have found this, although this citation is for a ‘’NerdWallet ‘’report that finds 647,000 medical bankruptcies. The data is collected from the courts, the census, the CDC as well as data from the Commonwealthfund.
Helps create preventable deaths
Almost 100,000 preventable medical deaths occur in the US, which is more than in other developed nations with universal healthcare systems. If we brought down our preventable death rate to compare with other nations, according to Commonwealth, we could save tens of thousands.
Kills a lot of people
Studies show that as many as 45,000 people die every year due to lack of basic healthcare, even after adjusting for habits, incomes and other external factors. This means that in a mere 5 years, 225,000 people die, and after a decade the death-count reaches 450,000. This can easily be prevented by covering everyone and guaranteeing access to basic care.
Burdens businesses with unnecessary costs
Here’s a pro-business argument for universal healthcare. Private businesses spent $637 billion dollars on healthcare, and that number is projected to balloon to $1.059 trillion dollars by 2025. In fact, just this year, healthcare costs have ballooned to $14,000 per employee.
This means for example, that if someone earns $10.00 an hour, and their employer is sponsoring their healthcare ($14,000 a year or $6.74 an hour), that means the equivalent labor costs for the businesses per employee are now at $16.74 an hour. Again, this extra $6.74 an hour in labor costs has nothing to do with wages, it’s just unnecessary weight.
Also, despite higher unionization and a higher minimum wage in Canada, it still costs General Motors $1,500 dollars more to manufacture the same car in the US. That’s because of employer-sponsored healthcare. Finally, a study on the effects of California’s SB562 single-payer bill found that it would reduce business costs up to 22%.