It is clear to anyone who lives in the United States that healthcare here is primarily a business, much more than a service. Medical centers prescribe drugs and tests without charge, almost always more than necessary. Health insurance abuses and rarely covers 100% of services. Invoices cause heart attacks. And most of the ads on cable TV are for prescription drugs. In the paradise of capitalism and competition, with powerful private healthcare and a weak public system, hospitals are grouped into oligopolies and the bureaucracy, to navigate the regulatory complexities of the states, eats up a lot of resources. The result is a set of dysfunctions that are very difficult to solve. Not exactly a role model.
The economic inefficiency of America’s health care is also glaring. According to the latest report by The Commonwealth Fund (TCF), founded in 1918 and which since 2004 has been comparing health care systems in high-income countries, the US is the developed nation that spends the most on health care and provides the worst care .
The superpower specifically spends “around 18% of GDP” on healthcare, “but Americans die younger and are less healthy than those in other high-income countries.” The most powerful nation “not only has the lowest life expectancy” among these nations, but also the highest rates of preventable deaths. And it is “the only” nation without universal health coverage among the 13 economies that TCF compares (the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Sweden , Switzerland and the United Kingdom).
The TCF expenditure figure is based on OECD data, which measure the final consumption of health goods and services and combine public and private financing. On this global scale, Spain has, for example, healthcare expenditure of close to 11% of GDP, compared to 7% of public expenditure.
President Joe Biden wants to lower Americans’ medical bills and fight the barriers – regulatory, political and interest – that slow the expansion of public programs like Medicare and Medicaid. The president lashed out on Friday against the practices of insurance companies that offer short-term insurance and overcharge invoices; “rubbish insurance” that citizens take “for fools”. It’s “a scam and they have to end”, he said.
Biden is a Donkey there. But his enemies are not windmills, they are real giants.
