Explaining USA Health Care Debate: Repairing Humans and Our Systems

USA Health Care debate is clearly about the allocation and distribution of cost. I keep hearing it expressed as a poor health care. Most instances where USA death tolls are higher could be attributable to relative affluence (affordable illegal drugs, affordable guns, affordable sugar).

Take Cancer. USA's system developed the best responses in the world, and help explain not just the increased rates of survivorship in the USA, but actually floats a lot of other boats as well.

The hypothesis being debated by politicians is not that cancer rates would be lower in a single-payer system, or that treatment of injury would improve, but that costs would be distributed differently. Right now you get very affordable health care if you have Medicare (are over 65) or are eligible for Veterans Administration hospitals, or perhaps are poor enough for Medicaid (I know less about that). But under those systems, you are better off if you have an extremely expensive ailment (like cancer) but not clearly better off (red tape) than if you go to the emergency room of a private hospital.

This blog was developed after a conversation with one of my kids who attended United World College in Bosnia y Herzogovina. All 3 of my kids have lived as ex-pats and wind up trying to explain a system that most people don't even understand in their own countries. If a nation can't even manage its own appliance repairs, how can it manage human bodies?

The answer is as complex as the question is simple. In the USA, people who are the smartest in their class go to Med School or get employed by pharmaceutical research firms. Those people are not available to fix laptops, the money is in fixing hearts and livers. In Ghana, only a slight fraction of smart people have the opportunity to go to med school. I means there are more smart people available to repair laptops.

All Will Be Revealed in Vermont, Postscript on ACA Tea Party

I'm in a tempest in Vermont, very high stakes.  But information is coming out of Montpelier so slowly that it would be a mistake to come to conclusions too early.   Until 10 days ago I thought my company had been underbid... we waited though to see the contract.   Our bid was lower and our qualification score higher.

In court tomorrow.

But my mind is still idling, so let me say a couple of things about ACA, the Affordable Care Act, monikered "Obamacare".

"Half of the population spends little or nothing on health care, while 5 percent of the population spends almost half of the total amount.2 In 2002, the 5 percent of the U.S. community (civilian noninstitutionalized) population that spent the most on health care accounted for 49 percent of overall U.S. health care spending (Chart 1, 40 KB). Among this group, annual medical expenses (exclusive of health insurance premiums) equaled or exceeded $11,487 per person."  Mark W. Stanton, M.A. www.ahrq.gov

In other words, the USA already ate 90% of the public health care apple with Medicare and Medicaid.  The ACA will neither do much for the young (a small percentage of whom need care) nor for costs (we keep doing major intervention on elderly).  Public health care works in Europe because the average person there realizes something most Americans haven't come to grips with.  We are all gonna die some day.   I have had to watch 3 of my 4 grandparents basically be tortured to death with extended care.