An unhealthy health-care system

From Reuters:

Americans spend twice as much as residents of other developed countries on healthcare, but get lower quality, less efficiency and have the least equitable system, according to a report released on Wednesday.

The United States ranked last when compared to six other countries — Britain, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand, the Commonwealth Fund report found.

The annual report has ranked the U.S. at or near the bottom for years. The new report is available here. It found that, in 2007, two years before the passage of the Affordable Care Act,

health spending was $7,290 per person in the United States, more than double that of any other country in the survey.

Australians spent $3,357, Canadians $3,895, Germans $3,588, the Netherlands $3,837 and Britons spent $2,992 per capita on health in 2007. New Zealand spent the least at $2,454.

This is a big rise from the Fund’s last similar survey, in 2007, which found Americans spent $6,697 per capita on healthcare in 2005, or 16 percent of gross domestic product.

“We rank last on safety and do poorly on several dimensions of quality,” Schoen told reporters. “We do particularly poorly on going without care because of cost. And we also do surprisingly poorly on access to primary care and after-hours care.
Great Britain ranked first in quality of care, while the Netherlands ranked no. 1 overall. both have been derided by critics of reform.

Will so-called Obamacare fix these deficiencies in the U.S.? Probably not. They mitigate them some.

Our only hope is to look to Europe and Canada, admit they do it a lot better and create a Medicare-for-all system.

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Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

One thought on “An unhealthy health-care system”

  1. Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan all have some form or version of universal health care. Harry Truman was proposing a national health insurance system throughout his whole presidency from 1945 onward but it was quashed and knocked down by the AMA and the GOP. If not for the right wing retrograde fascists of this country, we could have had a national health care system in the late 1940s. The fascistic libertarian cult is always a dependable enemy (enema) of any kind of national health care system. Their solution is to beg for charity from your neighbors or to just please die in the gutter which is so much freer and more capitalistic. That vicious pyschotic clown, Ayn Rand, signed up for Social Security and Medicare in her declining years. The libertarian tin foil cult is just a con from the billionaires like Steve Forbes who would actually benefit from such a system. The ordinary jerk libertarian cultist would derive no benefit from this cult other than delusion.

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