How paying top dollar for terrible health care is killing people in this country.

Just how bad is our health care system, really? It is the most expensive on earth, and a comparison to other nations yields shockingly bad numbers in any category you cite.

The World Health Organization's Statistical Information System (WHOSIS) website allows you to choose and compare health statistics in many categories for every country. To find out how well the US measures up, I composed a list of 28 "economic peer nations” for comparison to ours: France, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Andorra, Israel, Spain, Austria, Australia, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Japan, United Arab Emirates, Finland, Kuwait, United Kingdom, South Korea, China, San Marino, Italy, Singapore, Sweden, Brunei Norway, Cuba and Iceland. For 24 of these countries, I chose them because they have a per capita income comparable to ours, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita">using the World Bank, IMF and CIA World Handbook rankings for nominal GDP, inclusively). Blindly and arbitrarily, I chose a bracket encompassing a GDP of 15 percent higher and 15 percent lower than ours. I added three others which are industrialized but that lag far behind the USA in GDP, but are purported to have good health care systems: Japan, South Korea and China. No list would have been complete without them. Then I added Cuba because it is purported by some to have a superior health care system (mostly undeserved it turns out). I would have like to have added Taiwan and Hong Kong, but they are not recognized as independent nations by the UN, and, therefore, have no data on the WHOSIS website.

With a few exceptions, the data was from 2006. The cost figures show that, despite conservative complaints of government interference with our private market, the USA's health care system is already the most committed to the free market "experiment":



Notice that our public health care spending is pretty average in cost (but does do less) while our private health care spending is off the charts. These high expenses would be acceptable if they added up to a cutting-edge, superior, crack, health care system. However, the figures available from WHOSIS show that the results are actually poor, even in areas in which our research and innovations purportedly lead the world, such as cancer treatment. All rankings given here are from best-to-worst*:



The last statistic seems puzzling, because the US has purportedly the best cancer treatment, and a high survival rate from treatment. (Thanks to government and not private industry: http://www.dtp.nci.nih.gov/timeline/noflash/milestones/M4_Nixon.htm">Richard Nixon's War on Cancer has paid off, showing that good things sometimes come from bad people.) Perhaps it is because that those who do not take the full treatment might not be included in the recovery statistics, and it turns out that too many in the US simply cannot afford the full, prescribed treatment for their cancer. Our health care system has created a paradox where dazzling innovations used to justify our inflated health care expenses, which are leading to impoverished results in actually saving lives and improving health. The reason: financial difficulties, due to people being under-insured or uninsured, which frequently interfere with essential treatment of diseases.

Nothing shows this more dramatically than figures from a poll funded by the American Cancer Society Action Networks. Here is a list of the findings:



http://acscan.org/pdf/healthcare/reports/poll-05202009.pdf

Do our cancer recovery figures given include those who do not get full treatment? No doubt, delaying or foregoing necessary treatment has dire consequences for patients. Not surprisingly, the American Cancer Society has reported that the uninsured are more likely to be diagnosed with cancer only in the advanced stage, and they are subsequently more likely to die of it. The overall category of the uninsured are 60 percent more likely to die of cancer.

(This author had a personal experience with this working with a temporary, Harry, who said he had joint pain from “bursitis.” Later in the day he had a nosebleed, blocked it with a ream of tissue, and kept on working in obvious pain and emotional distress. The day after he was dead from lymphoma. In hindsight, he obviously knew something was seriously wrong with him, though I don't know if he had a diagnosis. It will always confirm for me that some of the insured are so afraid of the costs that only dire symptoms compel them to seek help. I myself have delayed needed medical care due to my uninsured status at the time, but not like Harry did. And that was in the early '90s.)

Nor is this economic terror only seen in cancer patients. According to a report from the Center for Disease Control National Center for Health Statistics a high percentage of the uninsured of ages under 64 are so afraid of the costs that they delayed or totally avoided needed medical care.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus08.pdf#058

In 2006, the CDC's survey (page 347 of 603) showed that 19.4 percent of people uninsured anytime over the anytime in 12 previous months avoided “needed medical help.” By comparison, 2.5 percent of the insured said they did not get needed medical help. For people who were uninsured for the entire 12 months, 23 percent said they avoided needed medical help. Additionally, 26 percent (rounded) of people uninsured during anytime in the previous year said that they delayed needed medical care, while, by comparison, 4.1 percent of the insured said this. Many of those in the uninsured categories did not fill prescriptions due to cost: 22 percent (rounded) as compared to 3.7 percent for insured people. Remarkably, the figures for the fully uninsured avoiding necessary prescriptions do not vary significantly by socio-economic bracket: the uninsured below the poverty level delayed care 28.1 percent of the time, those above 200 percent of the poverty line delayed care 26.2 percent of the time.

The economic terror people routinely live under is to become bankrupt, impoverished, drag one's family into destitution, and even worse, be of diminished health afterward and find one cannot help reverse the financial damage. Faced with this terror, most people would deny symptoms that would otherwise be dire, or would make a rational decision that if they are seriously sick, it would be better to die, though not openly by suicide.

Nor is this an irrational fear, this is terror of something all too real, which stalks the insured and uninsured alike. The figures available before the mortgage collapse from a study published in the American Journal of Medicine indicated that medical costs were a factor in 62 percent of bankruptcies, and surprisingly, 78 percent of those were filed by people who had medical insurance (indicating, also that private health insurance is providing inadequate coverage even at its high costs).

http://pnhp.org/new_bankruptcy_study/Bankruptcy-2009.pdf

Looking at these figures raises the question of how much more are medical bankruptcies adding to those caused by the waves of foreclosures and surge of unemployment? I do not expect figures to be available on this, yet, but it cannot be good. Still, it is reasonable to think that the additional medical costs are crippling the economy now and undermining any hope of a real recovery. Bankruptcy initially hits all the person's other creditors outside of health care who also have to eat the costs. The damage from it, according to a study from Ohio State University’s Center for Human Resource Research, effect the declarer for decades. Bankrupt people do not buy houses or cars at the same rate others do, and even getting an apartment might be difficult. They live with diminished consumer spending. It takes them 14 years on average to catch up to the non-bankrupt's net income. They are less likely to have retirement funds or savings which would provide capital for banks. Multiply that by tens or hundreds of thousands, and in other words, we are talking about lasting damage to the consumer sector. Medical bankruptcy is also something only effecting the US economy, meaning that our consumers are being it the hardest with financial hardship.

Those are just bankruptcies. Since former-President George W. Bush made bankruptcy much more difficult, many more families are being left destitute, and are permanently in debt and financially anemic with even less hope for recovery.

In theory, nobody who needs care will be turned away in this country, but they will overwhelmingly get billed, and the bills might damage or ruin their lives. Never mind that bankruptcy and destitution themselves tend to have negative effects on health. Our economic peer countries guarantee that no one who needs care will be turned away, they live up to it better, without the financial predation accepted in this country.

The fact is, the health care system we have is not superior, it is not adequate, it is poor-- and expensive, both. We pay so much for such bad health care that the word “immoral” is called for in describing it; not reforming it now would be downright depraved.

Moreover, a large number of people are being misdirected and misinformed. It is not the public system that is amiss, according to the proportion of its costs with other countries: it is the private sector. The costs of the private sector are so high and they yield such bad results that it's rational to suggest chicanery is the reason, and not inefficiency, innovation or lawsuits as we are told, but pure and perverse greed. Health care is expected to go up 9.7 percent this year-- in a depressed economy. The main reason for that rate of inflation is not some immutable economic law. It is that the health care industry across the board is trying to cash in now, just in case health care reform does somehow hurt their profits.

It is also reasonable to assert that the health care industry is showing a total disregard for people in this economy. Given the figures I see, I assert that they will not stop until everybody in the country is in poverty. Their investors will then just liquidate the companies and move their investments elsewhere. President Obama was absolutely right when he said that health care reform was absolutely essential to our economic recovery. The problem is, it might be too late, and he might not have a grasp for what is really needed.

Meanwhile, Conservatives and corporations try to misdirect us to the rising cost of public health care-- the funds for which overwhelmingly end up being paid to private companies. However, they are right, the cost of public health care is going up. This makes it an imminent threat to bankrupt consumers and government both. This is even more proof that the entire system must be overhauled. What most Conservative citizens enthralled by Limbaugh should realize is this: they themselves are in more direct danger of poverty from the predatory private health care system, and then having to rely on a public health care system Conservative propagandists convinced them to cut and cripple.

The Conservative audiences are kept in fear of any effective solutions, fear for losing what little that they have, and are kept in fear of any people who are willing to get solutions. The entire swindle of health care in the US is a formula composed of financial predation, financial terrorism, delivering an inferior product, fear mongering, and inciting blame and hate. We should not expect much good from any set of corporations choosing those tactics.

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Footnote:

*For cases when the USA's figures were tied in a category, I ranked the USA at the top of the tied cluster, such as, if the USA was tied for 11th, I simply said it was 11th, meaning, it was the best ranking it could be. The reason was that WHOSIS is extremely cautious about rounding its statistics. Such as, WHOSIS reports infant mortality in the US as being 8 per 10000 births, whereas the CDC reports infant mortality for the US is recorded with tenths as the last significant digit, i.e. 8.4 per 10,000 births. So, the US rankings might actually be worse than what they appear.

Other facts:

This article is an entirely re-written version of an article which appears on examiner.com:

http://www.examiner.com/x-12581-St-Louis-Liberal-Examiner~y2009m7d22-Health-care-part-1-quality-not-worth-the-price

And if I weren't the writer of that article, I would be guilty of plagiarism.