artcle on USA health system
- From: "dali" <borgersbrent@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 24 Aug 2005 08:04:03 -0700
An article in this week's New Yorker magazine has provided the
following
data on the USA health system. I used to post we spend twice as much
as
average for an industrial nation but the New Yorkers says this has
risen to
2.5 times with worse results than other nations.
---------
.....the United States has opted for a makeshift system of increasing
complexity and dysfunction. Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health
care
every year, almost two and half times the industrialized world's median
of
$2,193; the extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a
year.
What does that extra spending buy us? Americans have fewer doctors per
capita than most Western countries. We go to the doctor less than
people in
other Western countries. We get admitted to the hospital less
frequently
than people in other Western countries. We are less satisfied with our
health care than our counterparts in other countries. American life
expectancy is lower than the Western average. Childhood-immunization
rates
in the United States are lower than average. Infant-mortality rates are
in
the nineteenth percentile of industrialized nations. Doctors here
perform
more high-end medical procedures, such as coronary angioplasties, than
in
other countries, but most of the wealthier Western countries have more
CT
scanners than the United States does, and Switzerland, Japan, Austria,
and
Finland all have more MRI machines per capita. Nor is our system more
efficient. The United States spends more than a thousand dollars per
capita
per year-or close to four hundred billion dollars-on
health-care-related
paperwork and administration, whereas Canada, for example, spends only
about
three hundred dollars per capita. And, of course, every other country
in the
industrialized world insures all its citizens; despite those extra
hundreds
of billions of dollars we spend each year, we leave forty-five million
people without any insurance. A country that displays an almost
ruthless
commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its
economy-a
country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more
reliable,
and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were five cents cheaper-has
loyally
stuck with a health-care system that leaves its citizenry pulling out
their
teeth with pliers.
.
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