- cross-posted to:
- nyt_gift_articles
- cross-posted to:
- nyt_gift_articles
In 2017, Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress tried to eviscerate the A.C.A. and almost succeeded in passing a bill that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would have left 22 million more Americans uninsured by 2026. There’s every reason to believe that if the G.O.P. wins control of Congress and the White House in November, it will once again try to bring back the bad old days of health coverage. And it will probably succeed, since it failed in 2017 only thanks to a principled stand by John McCain — something unlikely to happen in today’s Republican Party, where slavish obedience to Trump has become almost universal.
If you want to preserve that access to health insurance, it’s worth checking your voter registration, getting involved as a volunteer for the Democrats and doing what you can afford to provide financial support
Doctor salaries do not account for the 550 billion dollar pharma industry or the 1.7 trillion dollar health insurance industry. As a comparison, Canada’s health industry is 112 billion USD. The USA’s population is 8.4x greater, 8.4x112 billion = 940 billion instead of 1,700 billion (1.7 trillion).
Canadian doctors earn 3rd most in the world, around 200k/year. US doctors earn about 117k more a year. There are just over a million doctors in the USA = about 117 billion dollars which brings the cost from 940 billion to 1.057 trillion instead of 1.7 trillion.
I don’t give a damn about GDP/consumption and have explained why in detail. You keep on saying the same thing, but you’re not going to convince me that US healthcare should be more expensive to the tune of 700 billion/year because Americans buy more electronics, vehicles, etc. Especially given that wealth inequality means there’s a huge variance in what people can afford.
With regards to pharma, other developed nations pay less than 1/3rd for the same medicine, which nullifies any inherent cost argument. Americans pay much more for medicine just because of allowed corporate greed.
I acknowledged that there’s more to life expectancy than cost of healthcare, but we don’t need to compare the UK to Thailand. We can compare the US to Canada, New Zealand, Germany, Japan, Korea, etc to see that it’s more expensive and yet does not extend American life expectancy past that of cheaper countries. If you read my links, you’ll see that the US has low doctors per capita, and high avoidable deaths per 100k when compared to peer nations - proof that Americans are not getting more for their money.
In order for your point about heroic interventions etc. to be valid in a US vs. other developed nations argument, you’d have to prove that the other countries are not saving their citizens (otherwise it’s a wash, with both groups saving seriously ill patients). Not only would the US have to be saving their citizens where others don’t, but they’d have to be doing so in large enough quantities to skew national statistics.
Even if experts agreed that the US system was great, I’d disagree because I can see the real-world end results. It’s not ethical that doctors have to argue/plead with profit-motivated insurance accountants to properly treat their patient. It’s not ethical when a seriously ill/wounded patient in a hospital is trying to figure out how they are going to deal with medical debt/bankruptcy that’s going to leave them impoverished.
However, I don’t need to worry about that dilemma because experts are not fans of the US for-profit system. As I’ve provided several links to prove, both economists and medical professionals regularly publish criticisms of the USA’s expensive, under-performing healthcare.