U.S. Health Care

Wow. According to this article in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle (thanks for the link, Dad!), our health care system doesn't compare favorably at all to those in Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

A few notable points:

(My numbers are all from the article listed above, but I haven't checked their data)

* We're # 1 in spending per capita -- our government spends around $7,000 per person per year on health care. Where on earth does it all go? This is in addition to what we pay for health insurance, and what is paid by our employers. I think there are just over 300 Million of us (give or take), so that's a ton of money.

* We're dead last in efficiency, patient safety, patient access (we don't have universal coverage), and effectiveness. This is not to say that we don't have excellent health care professionals. We do --- I know some of them. And we have excellent hospitals and other facilities, and the latest in technology. But so many in our country don't have access to the very best in care. It's so expensive, that many people choose not to go to the doctor, and even if they do they sometimes can't afford to get the prescriptions, tests, etc.

* 9 Million children are completely uninsured; 23.7 million have limited access to health care. I realize that's less than 10% of our population, but it's still not OK.

John Edwards is suggesting a reform of the health care system that includes mandated universal participation and universal coverage; Barack Obama also has a pretty good plan for universal coverage, he just wouldn't mandate universal participation. I don't know of any others who have come up with concrete plans. Let me know if they do!

Anecdotal evidence from my experience with the German health care system:

1) My mother, who had me in the U.S. and then Richard and Annette in Germany, always told me, if I were to get pregnant, to go to Germany to have the baby because they treat the mothers better.

2) When I was living here in 2000-2001 and running, I started having problems with one of my knees. I went to the doctor, who ran all kinds of tests, looked at my shoes, checked out my running gait, etc. and finally prescribed orthotics to wear when I run. They took molds of my feet, had the orthotics made to fit my running shoes, and I got the orthotics within a week. None of this cost me a single cent. All I had to do was show up at the doctor's. There was hardly any waiting, even.

3) Darrel (one of my students this summer) has a broken foot. We went to the clinic on Sunday, so he was seen as an emergency case. They checked out his foot, and taped it up and gave him medications. He went in the next day and was x-rayed and given a cast. He was given a prescription for a boot to wear over the cast (they didn't have any in his size). He just went to the medical supply place, showed them the prescription and they gave him the shoe. On Sunday, they didn't have him fill out any forms or show them his insurance card before going in, they just treated him. They didn't bother to see the insurance card at all, nor did they at any point talk about cost. On Monday, he did show the insurance card, but that's all he did. No mountain of paperwork, no co-pay, nothing. And he is obviously not a German citizen.