Here ya go!
The US Ranks Last in Health Care System Performance
FYI; Those that have means always receive preferential care.
OMG, you really picked a far-left one, didn't you? From your article:
Simply put, one's health overview—meaning access to care, affordability, and quality of outcomes—has a dramatic affect on one's level of happiness.
Other determinants of unhappiness—including poor working conditions, unemployment, poverty—are themselves strongly associated with poor health outcomes, especially in the absence of universal access to (quality) care.
More generally, financial insecurity (especially fearof unemployment or underemployment) contribute to chronic stress and anxiety, among other psychological problems, that in turn are detrimental to physical well-being. All of these conditions are clearly determined in part by our economic and social policies, which we can—if we wish—change so as to maximize our health and happiness.
In short, what this guy is saying is that Socialism is the answer to happiness and health. The Commonwealth Fund is an organization that promotes Socialized medical care. It's as bogus as it gets.
The United States once DID have the best health care in the world when it was strictly privately or local government controlled. But almost the very day that the federal government began getting involved, fraud was evident and prices began spiraling upwards to the point that the average family HAS to have insurance to afford even a routine visit to the doctor. And even though medical science has advanced dramatically--many conditions that were once essentially a death sentence no longer are--American health care has deteriorated to a less than optimum policies and procedures dictated by the insurance companies and the government rather than hands on diagnosis and treatment tailored to a specific patient. Your doctor probably uses the computer more than medical insight and skill to diagnose, treat, and prescribe for you.
Obamacare was supposed to fix all that, right? Alas it only made it much much worse and accelerated the downward spiral into automated medicine instead of medicine as a science and an art. Many wonderfully skilled doctors gave up trying and left medicine altogether. And we all know the promised savings to government and individuals never materialized and the costs escalated.
Government run healthcare may seem cheaper, simpler, easier. But it is not the best way to have a healthcare system.
You're 100% wrong. Th HMO Act was on of the best bipartisan regulations written, because both sides of the aisle saw where Corporate America was headed. The HMO Act worked well until it was deregulated by Reagan, and today we have the results of deregulation.
We buy our healthcare from the company store, and the company store is making record profits.
After spending a substantial amount of my working years working with, for, and around doctors and hospitals and being in positions to evaluate what was happening with both policy and medical costs, I will respectively disagree. Every point of course is not a negative but taking the entire issue as a whole, federal involvement has been far more negative than positive.
If by federal involvement means deregulating the HMO act, I agree.
Federal involvement also created the HMO act and infused our tax dollars into the process. There were benefits and also a lot of problems with it. One of the main problems was that once people learned to benefit from all that federal money, 34% of the money was going to administration, executive salaries, sales commissions et al and only 68% of the money was going to healthcare that was greatly escalated in costs that were already escalated with the implementation of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960's. There are always greedy people eager to latch on to 'free' government money and there is no way the central government can efficiently and effectively and economically administer most social programs in a country as widespread and diverse as ours is.