Despite Americans paying nearly double that of other nations, the US fares poorly in list of 10 countries
The United States health system ranked dead last in an international comparison of 10 peer nations, according to a new report by the Commonwealth Fund.
In spite of Americans paying nearly double that of other countries, the system performed poorly on health equity, access to care and outcomes.
“I see the human toll of these shortcomings on a daily basis,” said Dr Joseph Betancourt, the president of the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation with a focus on healthcare research and policy.
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The fund said the US would need to expand insurance coverage and make “meaningful” improvements on the amount of healthcare expenses patients pay themselves; minimize the complexity and variation in insurance plans to improve administrative efficiency; build a viable primary care and public health system; and invest in social wellbeing, rather than thrust problems of social inequity onto the health system.
Hold on let me roll for surprise.
Turns out a profit motive is not the best system for everything in the world. Who would have guessed?
It would probably be fine if everyone agreed to play by the rules, but they dont, and the US is terrible at enforcing them (or specifically, chooses not too, and doesnt impose new laws to stop loopholing)
But the administrative bullshit, and the other potential problems are exactly why other countries went for universal healthcare 🤷♂️
I think it’s more of a problem with over regulation. The U.S. healthcare system suffers from a lack of market freedom. While some may argue for more government intervention or even a single-payer system, many of the inefficiencies could be resolved by removing excessive regulation and encouraging more competition. A true free-market approach, with more choices and price transparency, could lower costs and improve care quality—something over-regulation has failed to achieve.
A capitalistic system will maximize for one thing and one thing only: Profit.
If anything else improves, such as service, cost, or wait times, it will only by as a byproduct of increasing profit. If there are easier, faster, or cheaper ways of increasing profit (such as cutting staff and having customers patients wait longer) then those will be done instead. The FDA exists because otherwise capitalistic companies will put customers health and lives in danger because it is more profitable to do so and pay out potential lawsuits than it is to make sure safety regulations are in place in the first place.
The only way to maximize something other the profit, such as customer service, is through regulation. That is why monopolies are illegal: if a customer doesn’t have a choice you can charge them as much as you want, and take as long as you want, and perform as poorly as you want, and they still have to use your service because they have no other choice. When a customer patient needs to go to the hospital they don’t have the luxury of “shopping around”, they have a medical emergency and need help now. So without regulation a profit motivated hospital can charge whatever they want, especially considering nobody discusses prices before doing life saving operations.
“lack of market freedom” is not the reason 1 Tylenol pill at a hospital costs you $15.
“Excessive regulation” is not the reason patients are charged $40 for crying.
“Lack of competition” is not the reason asking for an itemized bill will save you money. “It’s estimated that about 60 percent of medical bills that are issued have errors” (I can’t think of any other industry that would consider that acceptable.)
What specific regulations would you remove from hospitals, and how would the absence of those regulations directly help customers patients?
The US is last place in the linked article while having the most profit driven hospital system of the countries compared. Making it even more profit driven is not going to improve the thing customers patients need improved.
The U.S. health care system is a failure because of the continued existence of health insurance companies over the more streamlined approach of Medicare for All.
Also this graph is hilarious, albeit depressing.
Actually, many of those countries don’t have systems similar to Medicare for All. Netherlands, supposedly second in this list, has a mostly privatized system with mandatory insurance, so does Switzerland. France and Germany have semi-public and private health insurance companies. The US has bigger (and different) problems than merely the existence of health insurance companies.
Not really true about Netherlands:
The Netherlands has a dual-level system. All primary and curative care (i.e. the family doctor service and hospitals and clinics) is financed from private mandatory insurance. Long term care for the elderly, the dying, the long term mentally ill etc. is covered by social insurance funded from earmarked taxation under the provisions of the Algemene Wet Bijzondere Ziektekosten, which came into effect in 1968. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_the_Netherlands#:~:text=Health insurance in the Netherlands,long-term nursing and care.
See the social insurance aspect? The largest financial burden to the Healthcare system is usually a person’s last 5 years of life, so they’ve socialized the expensive parts of healthcare and privatized the cheaper stuff.
For Switzerland:
The insured person pays the insurance premium for the basic plan. If a premium is too high compared to the person’s income, the government gives the insured person a cash subsidy to help pay for the premium.[8]
This isn’t something done in every US state, to be clear. In some states it’s very hard to access healthcare if you can’t afford the premium. This lack of coverage often creates a heavier burden on healthcare systems because people are uninsured.
The Wlz (which replaced the AWBZ) covers only a minority of total health care costs. Expenses were €29 bln in 2023. “Mostly privatized” is accurate.
Both the Netherlands and Switzerland have universal health care systems and negligible rates of lack of insurance. My point is just that private health insurance isn’t the (only) problem, as these counterexamples show.
It’s helpful to know that if I ever leave the US, I’ll have better healthcare. I don’t even need to spend any time researching that aspect.
No, you actually won’t. I went to Canada, had an accident and had to wait 8 hours in the emergency room to get care because apparently I wasn’t dying
As an American, I had to pay $1000 for this privilege
But the US system ranks first in wealth extraction from people to billionaires, so it’s working as intended.
