I’ve been paying attention to the Times’ series “Paying Till It Hurts,” about the dysfunctional healthcare system in the United States. We all know the statistics — America spends far more on healthcare than any other country, while having just about the lowest life expectancy in the developed world, right below Slovenia and Costa Rica. Forbes calculated that the US will have spent $3.8 trillion for healthcare just in 2014, or $12,000 per person in one year. In contrast, Japan, the country with the second highest life expectancy (the highest is Monaco, but using it as a comparison would be cheating), spends around $4,500 per person per year, almost a third of what the US spends. Many Americans I talk to understands this vast discrepancy between the US’s overall spending and average of care, but a significant number of them have said (in similar lines), “The average American may receive below average care, but if you have money, the best care is still in this country,” as if that itself were desirable. But even this might not be true. The article linked here explores an outbreak last year of a potentially fatal strain of meningitis in Princeton. Several students contracted the disease, one had to have his feet amputated, and another one died. But Princeton students are rich Americans, so shouldn’t they receive the best care? It turns out a safe and effective vaccine for that strain of meningitis available in much of the developed world wasn’t allowed in America. It was simply too expensive for the Swiss drug company to apply for licensure in the United States, so they didn’t. This speaks volumes about the state of healthcare in the country. Outsiders look at the situation in America and see a broken society. In conversations with non-Americans, people overwhelmingly wonder why Americans are so selfish to refuse to contribute to a more socialist system that is both cheaper and better for public health. People look at the monolithic institution of medical insurance incredulously and say, how can Americans value profit so much more than human life? I live in a place where people don’t buy health insurance because it is considered a human right, and a trip to the hospital costs you virtually nothing. Medicine is heavily subsidised and regulated, and the idea of drug companies advertising directly to consumers is laughable. But America is such a libertarian society ruled by money that nothing will ever get changed, so I don’t really know why I even spent the effort writing this post.
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 09:11:21 +0000
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