U.S. trails rest of world in health care
By Chris Doherty
Deseret News
Friday, April 24, 2009
Let me begin by stating that I believe that neither the Canadian nor the U.S. health-care system is perfect, and both could be improved. Some Canadians in need of elective procedures are said to have to wait to see a specialist for their medical conditions in Canada. I, personally, had an appointment last week with a specialist here whom I had been waiting 16 weeks to see, because he is one of a small group of providers “approved” by my insurance. Waits can occur on either side of the border.
But my wait had an end to it. Some 48 million people will have no end to medical problems they are experiencing. Imagine having a migraine that had no end to it or a painful urological condition that continued indefinitely. Imagine if you had a suspicious mole and no way to know if it was cancer or not. That is the state of 48 million Americans, through no fault of their own.
Granted, there may be some who just thought they would save a buck or two and made an unwise decision. Those who willingly run the unnecessary risk may pay, and pay dearly, for their mistake. The rest are a group of people who are excluded from health care in this country. They are those who have either been priced out of the private insurance market, or have pre-existing conditions. In America, you are safe, as long as your medical conditions don’t prevent you from working for an existing company with benefits, you don’t get laid off and you don’t want to start your own company. Then you will continue to be covered.
Otherwise, you may want to consider moving to Canada, where health care is not just offered to the healthy or wealthy. Unfortunately, however, you still run the risk of bankruptcy, since medical bills contribute to half of all personal bankruptcies in this country, and three-fourths of those bankrupted have health insurance at the time they get sick or injured.
Consider what two peer-reviewed medical journals have published on the subject. First, from the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Proposal of the Physicians Working Group for Single-Payer National Health Insurance,” where we are told that “the United States spends more than twice as much on health care as the average of other developed nations,” and “the United States alone treats health care as a commodity distributed according to the ability to pay rather than as a social service to be distributed according to medical need.” From the New England Journal of Medicine, “A large sum might be saved in the United States if administrative costs could be trimmed by implementing a Canadian-style health-care system.”
The Physicians Proposal, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is available at www.pnhp.org. It is a proposal put together by responsible physicians who advocate an expanded and improved version of traditional Medicare. According to the proposal, “the world’s richest health-care system is unable to ensure basics like prenatal care and immunizations, and we trail the developed world on such indicators as infant mortality and life expectancy.”
In life expectancy, we are 29th, right behind Bosnia. People largely misunderstand this statistic. They think that Americans may live a few years less than the rest of the developed world. That is not what this statistic represents, since once people in this country reach that magical age of 65, they are eligible for universal care, in the form of Medicare. What skews this statistic are the unnecessary deaths of Americans before 65. This is what causes the average life expectancy to drop.
Our country discovered much of the medical knowledge that the rest of the world enjoys. Why, then, are we exporting these discoveries and trailing the rest of the developed world?
Chris Doherty, a multiple sclerosis patient, lives in Bountiful.