Why this country keeps fighting against providing health care coverage for everyone is just beyond me. Oh, I know the political reasons and those of the naysayers – but why we aren’t all way more upset about this and demanding better health coverage is something I can’t get my head around.
I suppose nobody really gets it until someone they love is in catastrophic care – my mom’s last hospital bill was $350,000 — and that was just the part that Medicare paid. If she hadn’t had private insurance on top of that, there would have been nothing left of her estate to pass along and provide for my disabled sister and nephew as well as leave a bit for my brother and I to share.
I’ve advocated for a while now that we ought to have a single-payer system to cover health care basics and catastrophic coverage. If people want additional coverage on top of that, they can go to an insurer, so there will still be business for them. But this idea that the country can’t afford to pay for health care is stupid – we already pay for the uninsured, through our own higher medical costs. If you think the uninsured aren’t already costing us money, you’re crazy – we pay for it in higher costs and insurance rates. And if you don’t want your tax dollars paying for it – well, I don’t want mine paying for a useless war for oil and subsidizing high oil prices, but I don’t get a choice about that.
We can’t keep fighting wars for oil, ignoring the need for a change to alternative energy, and ignoring the needs of our own people. Companies can’t afford to keep paying for medical insurance, and neither can individuals — and to me this is THE critical question of this election — how to get everyone some basic health care coverage.
Iraq and the economy are the other big issues. If we did a national energy program converting to clean energy, pushing solar and biomass research and exploring other alternative energies, and focused on real public transportation and more sustainable building in our cities, puling people back to the city centers and providing walkable services, we could go a long way towards a real restoration, provide jobs and restart our economy which is seeing the financial ponzi schemes of inflated assets crumbling.
But mostly we have to get healthy again.
Print Story: France is healthcare leader, US comes dead last: study on Yahoo! News
France is tops, and the United States dead last, in providing timely and effective healthcare to its citizens, according to a survey Tuesday of preventable deaths in 19 industrialized countries.
The study by the Commonwealth Fund and published in the January/February issue of the journal Health Affairs measured developed countries’ effectiveness at providing timely and effective healthcare.
The study, entitled “Measuring the Health of Nations: Updating an Earlier Analysis,” was written by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It looked at death rates in subjects younger than 75 that could have been prevented by timely and effective medical care.
The researchers found that while most countries surveyed saw preventable deaths decline by an average of 16 percent, the United States saw only a four percent dip.
The non-profit Commonwealth Fund, which financed the study, expressed alarm at the findings.
“It is startling to see the US falling even farther behind on this crucial indicator of health system performance,” said Commonwealth Fund Senior Vice President Cathy Schoen, who noted that “other countries are reducing these preventable deaths more rapidly, yet spending far less.”
The 19 countries, in order of best to worst, were: France, Japan, Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Some countries showed dramatic improvement in the periods studied — 1997 and 1998 and again between 2002 and 2003 — outpacing the United States, which showed only slight improvement.
White the United States ranked 15th of 19 between 1997-98, by 2002-03 it had fallen to last place.
“It is notable that all countries have improved substantially except the US,” said Ellen Nolte, lead author of the study.
Had the United States performed as well as any of the top three industrialized countries, there would have been 101,000 fewer deaths per year, the researchers said.
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