I don’t like using this little blog as a political pulpit but I do indulge in some fact-checking on occasion. Here’s a little something for the health care debate. Be forewarned: this will include things like “studies” and “statistics”. I’ll sum things up to make this nice and tidy for you though, so don’t fall asleep–really read this. You owe it to yourself to be educated on important subjects like this, if for no other reason than to look awesome in a discussion about it (Freud pwns all).
1) AMA study regarding causes of bankruptcy “Using a conservative definition, 62.1% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical”, “Most medical debtors were well educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations. Three quarters had health insurance. Using identical definitions in 2001 and 2007, the share of bankruptcies attributable to medical problems rose by 49.6%.”
Medical expenses aren’t just the single largest cause of bankruptcy, they cause nearly two-thirds of them. And these bankruptcies aren’t filed by poor, uneducated, uninsured people but instead by those we would define as “successful” and most have insurance.
2) Health expenditure We spend 50% more both per capita and as a portion of our GDP on health care than the second-highest country in either category. That puts us at roughly twice the average expenditure compared to other wealthy industrialized nations. And that’s certainly not all private expenditure. Our public expenditure (i.e. how much the guv’mnt pays) is average among wealth developed countries.
3) And yet, despite the massive amounts spent on health care, we utilize health care less than the average! We’re actually buying LESS for more total money. Talk about getting the shaft on bang-for-your-buck.
4) Oh, and what we’re buying is crap. Well, okay, it’s not crap. I mean we have health care on par with Slovenia at least. That only puts us roughly dead last in terms of quality for wealthy developed nations. That’s right folks, by common metrics our nation’s health is worse than Canada who arguably has one of the worst public health systems.
5) And despite paying more and having worse health care, we’re still commonly cited as “the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not ensure that all citizens have coverage.”
Is public health care better than private? Not always. Private health insurance and private hospitals still exist in many countries with public health care and perform better in some aspects (often called a “two-tier” system to health care). But the studies above show that a) public health care is fuckalot better than no health care (*waves to 50 million Americans*) and b) our current system has problems that are deeper than not-being-public.
Reform is badly needed for our system. Given how abysmal the current system appears to be it’s really quite likely a public option could provide us with an improvement in efficiency and cost. Whether or not we join the industrialized world with public health care remains to be seen, but at least get the reforms through the system soon!
And remember folks, for every one person screaming about fictional “death panels” when the cameras are rolling I’m sure you can find ten with horror stories of our current system, starting at the crushing cost and going swiftly downhill from there.
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Great, so right near the end of this diatribe I find that wikipedia has summed up most of what I’m saying with full references that match about half of what I used. Fucking Internet.
I want a t-shirt that says Fucking Internet on it.
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