Written by Avani Singireddy and edited by Humyra Karim
An exhausted mother sits over a dimly lit, empty kitchen counter, tearfully glancing over the pile of bills she must pay before the month’s end. When she sees last month's bills emulsify from the bottom of the newly accumulated pile, an inescapable wave of helplessness consumes her. In the darkness of the night, her eye catches the blinding glare of her insurance bill. The number 1,634 is forever burned in her mind. Living paycheck to paycheck, she realizes she has depleted all possible avenues of help. She wonders how much longer she can keep this up. Maybe, just maybe, if she skips her chemo medication, just for a few weeks, she could make it by. What other choice does she have? In a sigh of desperation and fatigue, she understands that she will have to for the sake of her children.
Healthcare is a right, not a privilege. No one should have to choose between their life and their livelihood, let alone struggle to make ends meet just to survive in the world’s most developed nation. Yet sadly this is the reality of over 27 million Americans. Annually, Americans spend $2.8 trillion dollars on healthcare, which works out to be about ⅙ the size of our economy and more than $8,500 per person. These overwhelming healthcare costs are not because Americans simply go to the doctor more than people in other industrialized nations; in fact, the average American actually goes to the doctor less than half as many times as the average German. Despite their higher hospital visitations, the per capita spending for healthcare in Germany is twice as lower than the United States per capita spending. In addition to these incredibly high costs of healthcare, Americans also receive lower-quality health services. The United States consistently ranks the lowest on all different measures of a quality health care system. Americans have the lowest life expectancy among industrialized nations, are on average 2x more obese than their developed nations counterparts, and have the highest rate of preventable deaths among their developed peer nations. Looking at these statistics, one would never dare to think the “almighty” United States would ever stoop to such lows in providing a basic service for its citizens. But what’s to be expected when the systemic forces at work enable such atrocities to be perpetuated.
The United States’ inefficient healthcare system is a product of corporate greed and governmental incompetence. How else are the millions of patients struggling to pay their bills whilst insurance companies rake in all-time new highs in profits to be explained? In America, the cost of the same procedure at the same hospital varies enormously based on the insurance provider. People insured under Medicare pay the lowest costs while those who are uninsured people pay as much as 4x the national average. The problem lies in the ability (or lack thereof) of patients to rely on insurers to negotiate with their hospitals and providers. With government-subsidized programs, such as Medicare, the government negotiates on behalf of the people to receive fair and reasonable prices whereas in the privatized industry it is left to profit-seeking insurers to estimate the best prices. Lack of bargaining power opens the door for profit-centered companies to exploit unassuming patients. This lack of bargaining power has a sort of ripple effect across the healthcare industry, whether it's in unbearable hospital costs or ever-increasing drug prices. For example, look at the heartburn medication Nexium. Nexium costs $23 in the Netherlands, yet somehow that exact same drug and dosage costs $215 here in the United States. But increasing bargaining power alone still would not be adequate enough to solve for obscenely high prices. The doctor-patient relation in America is largely shaped by the pay-for-performance system which essentially rewards doctors and hospital clientele for performing more medical procedures and tests. This, in effect, incentivizes hospitals to run more medical screenings than necessary in order to increase their profits. The only people the overpriced, low-quality American healthcare system even marginally benefits are those rich enough to run it.
The system is not broken; it was designed to be broken.
Life is irreversible. Privatized healthcare commodifies life, stripping it down to the status of a good to be bought, sold, or bargained for. At times, it seems as if we are no more than instruments of profit in the bigger monopolized game of healthcare. With recent efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and further decentralize our healthcare model, all hope for a better system seems to have been abandoned. Recent efforts of reform only seem to be a band-aid on the broken bone of healthcare. There is vast agreement on the need for reform but exactly how, still remains in question. Some have proposed a single-payer healthcare system, such as Medicare for All, which would effectively eradicate all private insurance and leave the federal government as the sole provider. Although there is still variability with how this would look in fruition, it is no secret that the implementation of a Medicare for All System would, on net, with taxes accounted for, reduce healthcare costs. However, many argue that nationalising the healthcare industry would have disastrous effects on our economy. Governments would have to accrue a tremendous amount of debt which could only induce our economy into an even more dire state, many argue. Others even argue that a single payer system would decrease the quality of healthcare as hospitals would have to undergo pay cuts to compensate for their loss of revenue. However, the question should not be either a single payer system or a privatized option but rather to what extent can the United States’ healthcare system combine both of these options. In nearly every single universal healthcare system private insurance still plays an integral role. Many developed nations still keep a private option available so people can buy supplementary health insurance to access a wider range of hospitals and providers. Nonetheless the need for reform is pertinent, but before we can even begin to solve the healthcare crisis in our society, we must first recognize that human life is priceless. The life of a single mother living paycheck to paycheck is just as valuable as the corporate elitists who run lucrative insurance companies. No longer can we stand idly by as a broken system tarnishes the very fabrics of our democracy.
We must demand change not because we want to, but because we have to.
Sources
Cover Photo by Hush Naidoo on Unsplash
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