One difference between the US health care system and those in countries with high quality UHC is that the latter doesn’t inject religion into their systems. Could that one little difference be costing the US health care system more than the excess administrative and profits costs of health insurance companies?
It’s impossible to abstract the full impact of faith in US health care. To see how fully it’s integrated into patient and physician decisions. All we can get are glimpses. One can only guess how much the ban on full reproductive, science-based, medical services will cost private health insurance companies. the additional costs for private insurance the ban full reproductive services for women. Faith-based medicine is why poor Teri Schiavo was forced to continue breathing for years after she had died. Faith-based medicine explains why research is conducted on the power of pray for the ill (over and over again because researchers can’t find any prayer effect).
b
It is possible to compare a faith-based, combined faith-science based, and a science based approach to AIDS in three countries.
Let's start with Uganda that was reported to have been hit hard and sooner by AIDS than any other country. (The qualification is necessary because testing and reporting of AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s were incomplete.) Regardless, Uganda initiated an AIDS policy in 1986. The ABC (abstinence, be faithful, condoms) approach. In the short-term, in the face of a deadly disease, recommending abstinence and fidelity may have changed behaviors, but the use of condoms was the only science based component of the policy. By the early 1990s the HIV infection rate in Uganda peaked at approximately 15% (2.66 million). It has since dropped to 5%. Success? Not as much as those numbers suggest.
The cumulative AIDS related deaths between 1980 and 2001 in Uganda were 947, 552. The CDC report for that same period in the US was 774,461 infections and 448,060 deaths or a death rate of 58%. The cumulative infections in Uganda aren't reported, but if they were no more than infection rate of 15% in 1990, is it reasonable to conclude that its death rate was only 35%? Therefore, either or both the infections were overstated and deaths understated.
Between 1990 and 2008, Uganda's population increased 79%. With no change in the number of people living with AIDS (annual new infections equally deaths), the population increase would have cut the infection rate by 79% (from 15% to 8.3%).
Whatever the success of Uganda's AIDS policy, it shines in comparison with the faith-based approach in South Africa. The estimated infection rate in 1990 was 1% and in 2007 was estimated at almost 12%. From 2004 through 2008, South Africa received approximately $1.5 billion in US PEPFAR funds to treat and combat HIV and AIDS. As of 9/30/08, 549,700 South Africans were receiving anti-retroviral drug treatment through the PEPFAR program. The infection rate appears to have peaked but it's too soon to tell if it's now declining.
Brazil demonstrates the science based approach. Initiated the same year as that in Uganda and had the same reported infection rate as South Africa in 1990, or 1%. Initially, the program in Brazil was "use condoms." (Today the government of Brazil annually purchases and distributes 1.2 billion condoms.) With the introduction of ARVs (anti-retroviral drugs), Brazil's program was modified: "use condoms," get tested, and get treated if positive though the government's guaranteed and paid for lifetime treatment program. Davida, an NGO for sex-workers, was invaluable to the government of Brazil in taking the message to an AIDS infection transmission epicenter. Distributing, condoms and health information and guaranteeing treatment for HIV/AIDS to sex-workers was a bit too sciency and not faith-based enough for PEPFAR. The Brazilian government elected to stick with Davida and forgo hundreds of millions from PEPFAR.
Brazil's AIDS rate today is 0.6%. With a total population almost four times the size of South Africa, the number of Brazilians living with AIDS is less than a quarter of the number in South Africa.
Keeping faith out of its AIDS policy, the government of Brazil has spared millions from being infected, saved millions of lives, and saved billions of dollars. How many and how much can't be quantified because that was the road not taken.
Too bad the idiots in DC like Stupak don't recognize that health insurance companies included abortion coverage because it's cheaper than excluding it. Sure wish someone in DC had the moxie to point out that the Hyde Amendment that the anti-abortionists love so much has cost US taxpayer billions if not tens of billions of dollars over the past thirty years. But no, they want to impose the more costly faith-based medicine on tens of millions more Americans. Then they wonder why health care costs continue to rise.