The Best Medical Care Money Can Buy
If you’re one of the 46 million Americans who don’t have a health insurance card, we’re terribly sorry:
CHICAGO — America may be the world’s superpower, but its survival rate for newborn babies ranks near the bottom among modern nations, better only than Latvia.
Among 33 industrialized nations, the United States is tied with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia with a death rate of nearly 5 per 1,000 babies, according to a new report. Latvia’s rate is 6 per 1,000.
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The U.S. ranking is driven partly by racial and income health care disparities. Among U.S. blacks, there are 9 deaths per 1,000 live births, closer to rates in developing nations than to those in the industrialized world.
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The Save the Children report, released Monday, comes just a week after publication of another report humbling to the American health care system. That study showed that white, middle-aged Americans are far less healthy than their peers in England, despite U.S. health care spending that is double that in England.
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“Our health care system focuses on providing high-tech services for complicated cases. We do this very well,” Thorpe said. “What we do not do is provide basic primary and preventive health care services. We do not pay for these services, and do not have a delivery system that is designed to provide either primary prevention, or adequately treat patients with chronic diseases.”
(emphasis mine)
I think that’s exactly right. As anyone who lives near a major U.S. hospital and has seen its specialized treatment centers consume more acreage with each passing year can attest, our priorities with regard to healthcare are completely out of whack.
Why not focus on primary and preventative care? Well, there’s really no margin in that is there. MRI exams, cardiac and orthopedic surgeries on the other hand: cha-ching!
2 Responses to “The Best Medical Care Money Can Buy”
This is what happens when you privatize the medical sector. Healthcare gets runas a business, and therefore, only those things that make money are focused on. It’s also more lucrative to alleviate the painand symptoms from a disease than it is to cure it, because the person with the disease will come back for more treatments than a person who is cured would.
A good example is when an HMO in California opened it’s own center for kidney transplants, and told everyone who was on that HMO that they could only get their transplants from that center. Suddenly, the amoutn of people who were getting transplants was cut in half, even though the number of people on the list at that center was TRIPLED compared to the old hospitals before the switch over. More people were dying on the new list than any two list from other hospitals combined.
I hate US healthcare.
Comment by refuge on May 10, 2006 at 2:33 pm.
Yup. I linked to the kidney story last week. Sad.
Comment by Chris on May 10, 2006 at 2:38 pm.