Two good articles on the US healthcare crisis
Mike Lillis has two excellent articles on the healthcare crisis in the Washington Independent. The first begins:
In 2004, Tommy Thompson, then-Health and Human Services secretary, approached his boss with a request. Observing that the nation’s doctors and hospitals operate a tangled web of incompatible forms and technologies, Thompson asked President George W. Bush to create a universal system of electronic medical records that would follow patients around the country, eliminate redundant treatments and, according to some estimates, trim billions of dollars from the nation’s annual health care tab. Thompson wanted the president to establish the system within 18 months.
“He came out for 10 years,” Thompson said this week, “and as a result, we haven’t been able to get there.”
The anecdote, which Thompson told the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday, offers a glimpse of the obstacles facing health-reform advocates. With medical costs skyrocketing, employers increasingly dropping or trimming coverage, Medicare projected to go belly-up in a decade and the number of uninsured Americans tickling the 50 million mark, most observers contend the health-care system needs a complete overhaul. But such shakeups are rare in Washington, where special interests spend millions to keep things as they are, and the political will to confront industry is all but absent. Instead, lawmakers tend to dabble at the edges of problems until sweeping change becomes unavoidable. The health reform debate now seems to revolve around when that time will arrive.
Thompson said that 2009 brings a great opportunity to overhaul the system. He argued that, politically, big reform will be feasible with the arrival of a new administration, while, fiscally, it will be necessary because of Medicare’s looming bankruptcy.
“It’s the perfect storm,” he said.
On Thompson’s side, there is near-unanimous agreement that the health-care system is broken. Patient advocates, for example, decry the millions of uninsured; employers want a coverage model that won’t nip their competitive edge over foreign companies, and doctors and hospitals want to spend less time wrangling with insurers over payments. Taken together, the troubles reveal a system in need of transformation. “One piece is not going to do it,” Thompson said. “It is too broken.”
Congressional lawmakers acknowledge as much. But identifying the problem is different than agreeing on the solution. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees Medicare and tax policy, conceded the “many difficult decisions” lawmakers face.
Continue reading. And the second:
A piece we ran this morning examines the current crisis in health care and the political barriers to fixing it. As the story points out, the U.S. spent about 16 percent of its gross domestic product — or $2.1 trillion — on health care in 2006. That raises the question: What do comparable countries spend on the same thing?
The quick answer: Not nearly as much. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which represents 30 developed-world democracies, Switzerland is second behind the U.S., spending 11.5 percent of its GDP on health care in 2004, the last year when comprehensive data are available. (By comparison, the U.S. spent 15.2 percent of GDP in the same year). Japan and the United Kingdom spent about half of what we did in 2004: 8.0 and 8.1 percent of GDP, respectively.
And that would be fine if the health benefits for all that health care spending were tangible. But it’s simply not the case. With half the health care spending of America, for example, Japan’s life expectancy is more than four years longer, according to the OECD. Infant mortality — at 6.8 deaths per 1,000 live births — is higher in the U.S. than in all the other OECD countries except Mexico and Turkey. And among the 26 countries reporting deaths from medical errors, the U.S. has the third-highest rate, behind Austria and Greece.
Also of dubious distinction, Americans die from preventable conditions at rates higher than citizens of all other industrialized nations, according to a 2008 study from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. While researchers noted that the reasons for that trend are many, one contributor is the “comparatively poor performance of the U.S. health care system,” the Health Affairs journal pointed out at the time.
Seems that sometimes, you don’t get what you pay for.
