Why Americans Keep Defending a Health Care System They Hate
Americans overwhelmingly agree the U.S. health care system is broken. Costs are higher than anywhere else in the world, outcomes are worse, and medical debt drives hundreds of thousands into bankruptcy each year. Yet when meaningful reform is proposed, including a single-payer health care system, political resistance hardens. This column examines the contradiction between widespread frustration and the refusal to adopt a proven model that delivers better care at lower cost in other developed nations.
What is it going to take for Americans to get behind a single-payer health care system? How many of your friends and neighbors need to go broke? How many babies need to die needlessly?
How many mothers need to suffer and die? How many people have to lose everything over fairly common ailments? How many hospitals need to close?
This is getting absurd. Never in all my life have I encountered a situation even remotely similar to the American health care system and our relationship with it.
We hate it.
All of us hate it with a red hot passion.
And why wouldn’t we hate it? We pay unbelievably more for our care than literally everyone else who doesn’t reside in this country, and all of those people receive better care and better outcomes and have healthier populations. Of course we hate it.
We hate the insurance companies. We hate the hospitals. We hate the nickel-and-dime pettiness of the overly complicated billing process. We hate the cost of it all. We hate the treatment we often receive when we are forced to go to the doctor, or, God help us, the hospital.
We hate it and hate it and hate it …. until someone tries to change it. And then, for some unknown reason, half of the country fights tooth and nail to save it while pretending that anyone trying to change it is a socialist who wants to kill elderly people.
It’s the nuttiest thing I’ve ever encountered.
In fact, it’s how we ended up with Obamacare — a system that even the program’s namesake didn’t want. President Obama wanted a single-payer system. He wanted something on par with the system that serves Canada and several other developed nations around the globe.
Those nations pay significantly less for care. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Americans pay just under $14,000 per year for care. The average among 23 other peer nations is less than $7,400 annually.
Americans pay more for literally everything: outpatient care, inpatient care, surgeries, routine visits, dental care, vision care and, of course, prescription drugs.
But surely we get better results, right?
Nope.
People in those other 23 countries live longer, have fewer ailments, experience roughly similar wait times for routine treatments and minor surgeries, and typically less wait time for emergency care and emergency surgeries.
And, oh, by the way, not a single person in most of those 23 countries experienced a personal bankruptcy due directly to the cost of medical treatment. The U.S. averages more than 500,000 every single year.
Josh Moon is an investigative reporter and columnist. You can reach him at jmoon@alreporter.com.