The WHO rates us at the bottom because we don't have socialized healthcare, not because we don't have good outcomes.
I wasn't talking about the WHO. Its a well known fact and it is about bad outcomes. The US spends twice as much as any other developed country on health care and gets the worst outcomes though on some things for instance heart problems it is the best.
A Harvard study confirmed that the U.S. has substantially higher spending on health care, worse population health outcomes, and worse access to care than other wealthy countries; but there’s more to it than that.
news.harvard.edu
I don't know if you have seen the videos of people in the UK being told how much healthcare costs in the US.....? An organisation called NICE decides what meds we can use - that is what it believes is a good deal based on price and the effect it has on people. Then they do deals to get things cheaper. Other countries pay less for US drugs than you do.
Yes I know people do crowd funding to go to the US for really expensive medical treatment which may work, will not definitely work but may work because they cannot get it here.
Well and good but totally unnecessary.
Well I have heard lots of Americans speak about this in Documentaries. Too many to be making up lies and no reason to lie. Many people go bankrupt with your ridiculous bills even when they are not taking over a wing of a private hospital.
A Harvard study confirmed that the U.S. has substantially higher spending on health care, worse population health outcomes, and worse access to care than other wealthy countries; but there’s more to it than that.
news.harvard.edu
But you do remain paying about twice as much as other first world countries and you do have the worst outcomes. That article is confirming this but also saying the reasons for this situation is different to what people believe. No one has ever said, and I did not say that you do not have some of the best Drs in the world but it does remain that as things are you pay about twice as much as people in other 'Western' countries for your Medical Care and you have the worst health outcomes.
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Your article talks very little about outcomes and focuses mostly on spending. What outcomes are they speaking of and where are they getting their data from?
Healthcare services are not the entire picture. In fact most people that die do so on a government healthcare plan like Medicare. Many of our healthcare problems are more related to lifestyle than the quality of healthcare.
For instance we have a huge drug problem in this country and it's only getting worse now that this dementia patient is allowing all kinds of drugs and illegals into the country. We are also the fattest country in the world as well. Single-parent homes often depend on fast food to feed the family. There is nothing that any healthcare system can do about that. In our country women are having children at a much later age than those in other countries. They use their youth to attend school, pay off student loans, pursuing a career, and then have children well past the age of 30. This leads to premature infant deaths and illnesses.
As for costs, government is the main culprit. Government programs often pay only 2/3 of the bill for their patients. Healthcare providers need to make up that loss, and they do so with insurance covered patients. This increases the cost of healthcare for everybody else. I forget who said it now, but it was stated only a fool would expect the entity that created the problem to have a solution to it.
In our lawsuit happy country our doctors and nurses have to pay for malpractice insurance which is very high. Lawsuits are seldom ruled in the plaintiffs favor, but the cost to fight these lawsuits are astronomical. This leads to what's called
Defensive Medicine. Years ago if you went to your family doctor for an ear ache, he would examine you and provide a solution to your problem. Today, your family doctor is more or less a referral service. If you have an ear ache, he now sends you to an ear, nose and throat specialist. If you have diabetes, the doctor sends you to an endocrinologist. If it's a vision problem, he or she sends you to ophthalmologist. The list goes on and on. The bottom line is everybody is trying to pass the buck to another doctor so they don't have to deal with any potential lawsuit.
In the ER they too face liability. So they run you through every possible test imaginable even if it doesn't have anything to do with your condition. In the ER they have to treat the problem right away and can't rely on any specialist to takeover. These tests cost a ton of money, and that adds to our healthcare costs.
The problem is nobody in our government will address these cost problems, because many of our representatives were lawyers, and they're not about to turn their back on their colleagues. After all, if they lose an election, they will have to return to their former profession.
