U.S. healthcare lags among industrialized nations

/image via mydcdental.com

U.S. healthcare service delivery is not the best in the world.

This week, the privately funded and nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund (CF) released an international survey that evaluates the delivery of healthcare services and measures of health in 11 industrialized countries, including the United States. The key findings of the international survey should be sobering for Americans:

• Citing unaffordable costs of care, 33 percent of U.S. adults reported going without medically advised care, skipping visits to a doctor when they got sick, and not buying prescribed medications. In contrast, only 7 percent of U.K. and German adults reported similar difficulties linked to cost of care.
• Low-income U.S. adults fared the worst in the CF international survey in terms of foregoing medical care because of cost, with 43 percent of respondents reporting they had skipped getting care because they could not afford it. Low-income adults reporting similar struggles with cost of care in the other 10 industrialized countries surveyed range from 8 percent in the United Kingdom to 31 percent in Switzerland. 
• The United States also is an outlier for poor health compared to other industrialized countries, the CF international survey shows. Americans had the highest rate (28 percent) of suffering from multiple chronic conditions. 

For decades, opponents of attempts to fundamentally improve the delivery of healthcare services in the United States have spewed patriotically correct rhetoric, claiming that American healthcare is the best in the world. These largely false claims have been largely politically motivated.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) has attempted to make meaningful reforms, and opponents of Obamacare have vilified the law as a nefarious example of government over-reach that undermines the American healthcare sector's greatness.

Now, with Republicans in control of the White House and Congress, efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare are at the top of the political agenda in Washington. Brace yourself for a tsunami of bullshit from politicians seeking to score political points.

Brace yourself for false claims that Obamacare is undermining the greatness of U.S. healthcare services. Any such claims will be largely untrue and designed to achieve political gains that are petty compared to the interests of the American people at stake.

While certainly flawed in some areas such as making healthcare services affordable for all U.S. citizens, Obamacare is a leap forward from the status quo when the law was adopted in 2010. For example, Obamacare makes it illegal for insurance companies to deny coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, and it allows families to keep their children covered for medical expenses until they reach age 26.

The politics at play in efforts to reform the U.S. healthcare sector should be sickening for Americans. The economics should be infuriating.

In 2010, when the PPACA was adopted, U.S. citizens spent about $2.6 trillion on healthcare services. Although the pace of ever increasing U.S. healthcare spending has slowed since Obamacare became the law of the land, healthcare spending is projected to account for 20.1 percent of economic activity in the country by 2025.

In a prepared statement accompanying the release of the international survey, CF President David Blumenthal, M.D., highlights the economic bottom line: Americans are getting ripped off.

"The U.S. spends more on healthcare than any other country, but what we get for these significant resources falls short in terms of access to care, affordability and coordination," he says. "We can learn from what is working in other nations. If we're going to do better for our patients, we need to create a healthcare system that addresses the needs of everyone, especially our sickest patients and those who struggle to make ends meet."

A research paper that features more details and analysis of the CF international survey has been published in the journal Health Affairs.