Our Health Care System Is Still Broken

If you listen to the Republicans, they will tell you that our health care system is not broken. In fact, they say, we have the greatest health care system in the world. Many Democrats will tell you that the system was broken, but it has been fixed by the passing of Obamacare. Both are wrong.

Our health care system was, and still is broken. And while the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) made it a little better, it did not fix the broken system. What it really did was tantamount to putting a pretty band-aid on a serious wound that required surgery.

Note the chart above from the New York Times. It shows that patients in the United States are paying far more than patients in other developed nations pay for some common procedures. And these are far from the only examples of this. The truth is that every medical procedure, from the simplest to the most complicated, costs more in the United States than it does in other developed countries. And it gets even crazier. Medical procedures and hospital stays have widely varying costs in different cities, and even in different hospitals located in the same city.

The conservatives will say that competition will drive down medical prices, but that has not happened. Medical prices have risen sharply in spite of competition available in many places. One of the problems is that patients are not aware of the prices being charged (since those prices are not publicly stated). Another is that medical care is not like another consumer product that a customer can simply not buy if the price is too high -- and they cannot buy a "used" product to save money. Many times the only option to a high-cost medical procedure is death, which gives the provider the opportunity to charge whatever they feel like charging (since the consumer has no real choice).

Now some of you may think this is not an important problem, especially for those of you with insurance. But you would be wrong to think that. More and more, insurance companies are going to high deductibles and high co-pays to keep their own costs down (and maximize their profits). This means that people with insurance are often left with high medical bills to pay after the insurance company has paid their portion (and people with no insurance are priced out of the medical care market altogether).

That is why the leading cost of bankruptcy in the United States (by far) is an inability to pay huge medical bills -- and most of those declaring bankruptcy because of high medical bills are people who do have health insurance. How much longer can we justify a health care system that drives many into bankruptcy every year -- even if they have health insurance?

If you don't think our health care system is badly broken, then you are either rich or very healthy. I personally don't want to see Obamacare repealed, because it did solve a few problems. But it didn't go nearly far enough in fixing the health care system. It needs to be strengthened or replaced -- and I think it should be replaced with a government-run, single-payer health insurance system (something like Medicare for all citizens). If the government was the only payer, they could negotiate prices and set fair prices for all areas of the country -- a price that would fairly compensate providers while protecting consumers.

We hear right-wingers in this country disparage single-payer systems in countries like Canada, France, and Great Britain. But ask any of the citizens in those countries if they would trade their system for ours. None of them, not even the conservatives in those countries, would be willing to do that. For them, decent medical care is a basic right available to all their citizens -- not a privilege afforded only to those who can pay. And that's the way it should be in this country. After all, we are talking about life and death -- not some consumer product a person can do without.