America’s Biggest Disease – Healthcare

Our healthcare system is killing us. Although ultra-conservatives believe otherwise, the worst part of the Affordable Care Act – so-called Obamacare – is that in order to pass, it was so severely compromised to protect profit-making incumbents in the medical field that it did little or nothing to encourage competition among providers. Americans pay the most per capita for healthcare on earth, yet we are experiencing declining life expectancies even though the cost of our system, which absorbs a full 20% of our GDP, has risen a staggering 33% from 2004 through 2011. At approximately $8.2K a head per year, the United States delivers an average life expectancy of 79, while at less than half that amount, Japanese can expect to live to 83, Spanish citizens 82 and UK residents 80. 2013 is likely to see continued rises in costs, with a projected $2.8 trillion total.

When the Act was passed, the healthcare insurance industry traded administrative cost caps – but the hospital system raised the cost of medical services for everything except federal Medicaid and Medicare – for mandatory coverage without any competing low cost federal competition. The proposal for this low cost alternative was in the original bill, but conservatives willing to accept the new law called it “socialist” (a label you use to kill proposals in Congress) and instead allowed the medical industry to continue along its merry way to escalate costs without the slightest risk of real competition. The provision was expunged from the proposed law with surgical precision.

And our pharmaceutical companies destroyed any competitive threat, under the guise of protecting consumers from shoddy foreign drugs, by banning prescription imports from such third world countries like Canada, the UK and France. That provision of the proposed legislation was sliced from the final bill as if it were a malignant tumor! Time Magazine (February 20^th) noted that Lipitor cost three times more in the United States than in Argentina, U.S.-bought Plavix cost four times the price in Spain and Nexium eight times higher than in France.

Competition, the mainstay of the American capitalist market system, was purged from the statute by politicians with their campaign contribution hands deeply inserted into the pockets of these healthcare incumbents. Now many of these same politicos bitch and moan that the system they sabotaged is just too expensive… for the very reasons that they sabotaged the system! And given the doctrinaire logjam in Congress, don’t expect there to be any quick fixes any time soon. The Right wants to watch as the poison pills they shoved into the legislation do their dirty work and continue the profoundly unjustified rise in the cost of medical care. It allows them to trash the legislation they hobbled in the first place.

Time also noted that 62% of American bankruptcies are related to medical costs, and 69% of those medical bankruptcies occurred in families with health insurance! We’re ranked 50^th, nine spots behind Cuba, on the infant mortality scale according to Time! There are virtually no medical procedures in the United States that are performed less expensively anywhere else on earth. But the price differences are often multiples over the costs of even the next most expensive country for the relevant procedure. For example a coronary by-pass (which averages $3,164 in France) is a pretty expensive procedure in Australia (average $38,891), the second most costly country for that surgery, but the U.S. kicks in at a whopping average of $67,583. Time Magazine. An U.S. appendectomy costs more than double ($13,003) the Canadian or Swiss (the latter being the second most expensive at $5,840) average.

Even within the United States, the cost of care for the same procedures varies all over the map. The March 15^th Bloomberg.com notes that a new federal study found that, depending on hospital and type of insurance, the spread is enormous for even common conditions – like urinary tract infections where billings ranged from only $50 to as much as $73,000.

“Nonprofit hospitals, the cornerstone of many communities, capriciously overcharge patients, sticking the powerless with exorbitant bills, while paying lavish salaries to their executives; drug companies, which charge humongous markups to American customers, rake in huge profits; trial lawyers, with the threat of legal action, add to the cost of defensive medicine; President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act does little to bend the cost curve, and while conservatives rail against Medicare, the government-run program is more efficient and customer-friendly than the private system.” Albert Hunt for Bloomberg.com, March 3^rd.  

The subtext to this and almost every other piece of economic legislation emanating from Congress these days (the little that does pass): the cost of running for office is so expensive and so much longer than it has ever been (incumbents start raising money for their next campaign as soon as they are elected) that incumbent industries willing to fork over those campaign contributions have little to fear from government regulation or actual competition in a free market economy. Pay enough and the rules will tilt severely in your favor. America has indeed become a land of opportunists, and it really doesn’t matter how many must die, get sick without hope or file bankruptcy so that incumbent business can rake in unjustified profits free from any real competition. Corporate socialism trumps!     

I’m Peter Dekom, and statistics clearly illustrate that the United States has the worst medical system in the entire developed world… and the most expensive.