Spend Less, Get More
The U.S. Health system looks especially dysfunctional when you consider how much money we spend per capita on healthcare — $6,000 plus per year, twice as much as any other country — and how little we get for it.
Canada spends $2,163 and boasts a life expectancy of 79.8 years, two and a half years longer than the US. Their infant mortality rate per thousand is also better than ours, as is their adult mortality rate.
Switzerland spends about 11% of its Gross Domestic Product on universal health care for all its citizens, while the U.S. (with 50 million uninsured this year) spends 15% of GDP with embarrassing results.
[Blake Fleetwood, "Cuba has Better Medical Care than the U.S.", The Huffington Post 24 April 2006.]
Am I the only one who takes the point that we, the US, wastes an amazing amount of "health-care" money on an insurance system that itself wastes a great deal of money to see to it that a large number of people do not get the health care that we could easily afford — if only we provided it for everyone?
One Response
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Leave a Reply
To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.
I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Wednesday, 26 April 2006 at 00.30
Permalink
It's not quite that easy, but I like the thought a lot.
In addition to cutting out the insurance and attendant paperwork bureacracy, there are many other things that could be done to provide affordable health care for all.
If we wanted to, we could double the number of physicians and triple or quadruple the number of nurses and other caregivers within 20 years. Believe it or not, the U.S. government educates and trains physician assistants, medics and the full range of ancillary medical personnel. It could educate and train doctors and nurses as well. That would go a long way to driving down the price of health care.