As US Life Expectancy Drops, Life for the Elderly Falls Even Faster

  

     Source: World Bank/KFF Health News | Data is from 2021 or nearest year. | By The New York Times

Elder care and health care in the United States, the only developed nation earth without universal healthcare, heavily subsidize and prioritize corporate profits in these sectors above looking after its most vulnerable citizens. We should be embarrassed by this colossal failure, but lockstep right-wingers have developed slogans, materially altering the dictionary definitions of the words they use, that impute “creeping socialism” and “unsustainable entitlements” when the obvious corrective steps need to be taken are mentioned. What they are really saying is: “We will do anything in our power to keep taxes on the rich as low as possible” but most certainly will cut obvious benefits to the vast majority of Americans to accomplish that. Another way of saying this is that we have a massive federal deficit, for which all American taxpayers bear the burden, because we refuse to tax the wealthiest… effectively having all of us subsidize a very few of us.

Start with the harsh reality that growing old in the United States increasingly means “dying broke,” and suicide rates among the elderly are soaring. The United States is 19th among developed nations in supporting the elderly (long term care), from 4.1% of GDP in the Netherlands to 1% in the United States. All this to keep taxes for rich Americans (individual and corporations) low.

Long term care insurance is rather expensive, and despite the cost, the for-profit facilities have generated a litany of scandals over shabby care, high communal transmission of diseases (particularly salient during the COVID peak) and questionable sanitation standards. “Most people who had been in a facility or had a loved one there in the last two years said that finding long-term care, and affording it, was difficult. Some families said that they were shocked by the high costs of nursing homes and aides when considering those options.” NY Times, November 23rd.

We brag about our healthcare innovation, building state-of-the-art medications and technologies at a furious pace. We pioneered the mRNA anti-COVID vaccines, and our medical diagnostic equipment is staggeringly effective. But those amazing developments often do not reach a very large segment of Americans. “Our health care system does tend to produce more innovation than many others… But much of the spending does little to improve people’s lives. Despite all our spending, the U.S. has the lowest life expectancy of any high-income country.” David Leonhardt, writing for The Morning New York Time news feed (December 4th), who also presented the above charts. Why? Leonhardt continues: “Twenty years ago, a group of researchers — Gerard Anderson, Uwe Reinhardt, Peter Hussey and Varduhi Petrosyan — published an academic paper that tried to solve the mystery. The title told the story: ‘It’s the prices, stupid.’

“You can find a poignant example in a series that The Times and KFF Health News (a nonprofit) have been publishing in recent weeks. It’s called Dying Broke, and it examines the long-term care industry. One major part of the industry is known as assisted living, a name for facilities that are home to about 850,000 older Americans who need help with daily activities — like getting dressed or taking medications — but who don’t need constant nursing care.

“These facilities can be highly profitable. ‘Half of operators in the business of assisted living earn returns of 20 percent or more than it costs to run the sites, an industry survey shows,’ Jordan Rau, a reporter for KFF, writes. ‘That is far higher than the money made in most other health sectors.’

“Many facilities, Jordan explains, ‘charge $5,000 a month or more and then layer on extra fees at every step. Residents’ bills and price lists from a dozen facilities offer a glimpse of the charges: $12 for a blood pressure check; $50 per injection (more for insulin); $93 a month to order medications from a pharmacy not used by the facility; $315 a month for daily help with an inhaler.’

“Other countries tend to hold down health care costs through regulation. Their government officials set prices that are high enough for health care providers to operate yet significantly lower than in the U.S. Policymakers here, by contrast, allow the market to operate more freely. But competition often fails to bring down prices because the health care sector is so complex, with opaque pricing and bureaucratic insurance plans.

“It’s worth pointing out that the U.S. didn’t always have such high health care prices relative to other countries. The gap began to widen in the 1980s, as Austin Frakt, a health economist at Boston University, has pointed out. That decade also happens to be when the U.S. began moving more toward a laissez-faire economy.” American laissez-faire has generated the highest income inequality in the entire developed world. See also my November 13th Mutually Exclusive: Massive Profits or Solid Healthcare? blog. As Donald Trump (with MAGA GOP support) pledges, once again, to eliminate the Affordable Care Act (ACA), one that provides affordable health coverage for millions and millions of Americans, profits to pharmaceuticals, private insurers and hospitals have never been higher.

All the GOP candidates want to repeal and replace the ACA, but as Michael Hiltzik tells us in the December 5th Los Angeles Times, noting that they had all the Trump years to do that… and didn’t even come up with a proposal: “To take just one [more] example, in August 2022, legislation to allow Medicare to negotiate the prices of its most-prescribed drugs with their manufacturers came before the Senate and House. How many Republican senators and representatives voted for it? Exactly zero. It was passed with Democratic votes and signed by President Biden, and is now the law of the land.

“A couple of things are clear about this emerging Republican position on the Affordable Care Act and on U.S. healthcare more generally: They don’t have a clue about what to do with it. That doesn’t matter, because they have no intention about doing anything. They’re just gaslighting the public.” Yeah, we don’t want to tax mega-wealth and deprive a fat cat of buying his third vacation home and upgrading his jet. But cutting Social Security and Medicare is OK? Huh?

I’m Peter Dekom, and among those still believing that 2024 is still an “issues” election, what do they prefer? Greater income inequality or a more affordable and pleasant quality of life.