The Shame of America's Health Care System

In recent posts I have looked at the findings of studies that have shown the true nature of America's health care system (assuming one can even use the term "system" to such a broken scheme) as the most expensive in the world and one of the least efficient in its delivery of medical care.  America places dead last compared to systems in other advanced nations in terms of quality of care for money spent.  The New York Times picked up on these same findings and made it the focus of its main page editorial yesterday.  Here are excerpts:

Even as Americans struggle with the changes required by health care reform, an international survey released last week by the Commonwealth Fund, a research organization, shows why change is so necessary.  

The report found that by virtually all measures of cost, access to care and ease of dealing with insurance problems, Americans fared poorly compared with people in other advanced countries. The survey covered 20,000 adults in the United States and 10 other industrial nations — Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Britain, all of which put in place universal or near-universal health coverage decades ago. The United States spends far more than any of these countries on a per capita basis and as a percent of the national economy. 

For that, it gets meager results. Some 37 percent of American adults went without recommended care, did not see a doctor when sick or failed to fill prescriptions in the past year because of costs, compared with 4 percent in Britain and 6 percent in Sweden. Nearly a quarter of American adults could not pay medical bills or had serious problems paying them

The complexity of the American insurance system is also an issue. Some 32 percent of consumers spent a lot of time on insurance paperwork or in disputes with their insurer over denials of payment for services they thought were covered. 

The Affordable Care Act was created to address these problems by covering tens of millions of uninsured people and providing subsidies to help many of them pay for policies; by setting limits on the out-of-pocket costs that patients must bear; and by requiring that all policies cover specified benefits. 

The reform law, however imperfect, is needed to bring the dysfunctional American health care system up to levels already achieved in other advanced nations. 

Frighteningly, the Republicans want to scrap the Affordable Health Care Act and slash Medicare and Medicaid thus leaving even more Americans without access to health care.  And this from the political party that pretends to honor Christian values.  The hypocrisy is unbelievable.