USA fails in health care ratings

With the debate over the future of Obamacare now underground, it’s a good time to review the state of health care in the United States. How has the U.S. health care system performed for all of us, rich and poor, insured or uninsured, over the past quarter-century?

The short answer: Not great.

The latest study on the quality of health care internationally between 1990 and 2015, published in The Lancet, a leading medical journal based in the United Kingdom, examined what researchers call “amenable mortality” in 195 countries. It’s a clever way of looking at health care outcomes and not just spending or sickness.

Instead of merely considering mortality rates, researchers investigated death rates for medical conditions that “should not be fatal in the presence of effective medical care.”

The United States tied for 34th under what’s called the “Healthcare Access and Quality Index” with Estonia and Montenegro, countries with gross domestic products that rank a piddling 104th and 155th in the world. That a nation with the wealth and technology of a superpower like the U.S. has a health care performance behind that of Slovenia, Cyprus and Malta is nothing short of a national disgrace.

Yet one wonders if the American public even appreciates how bad things are, or are they, like many members of Congress, caught up in the minutia of Medicaid expansions or the operation of insurance exchanges?

The crisis is that the nation pays too much and receives too little in the health care system, and it’s literally killing us. The number of preventable deaths by neonatal disorder, heart disease, non-melanoma skin cancer, diabetes and kidney disease is simply not in line with our spending of $9,000 per man, woman and child each year, the highest of any country.

Why doesn’t Congress focus as much on the cost of sickness to this country as it does on the cost of taxpayer-subsidized insurance? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated that the cost of illness to employers alone (in lost productivity and sick days) runs about $225.8 billion annually.

Even with Obamacare, there are still an estimated 28.5 million Americans without health insurance coverage — many of whom simply can’t afford it.

When will Americans get wise and demand better access and results?

The Baltimore Sun