US health care – questions every one must ask themselves.

Heath care intrinsically implies taking 'care' of your 'health'. But does the US allow one to do that?

In the past weeks several senators re-iterated their favorite tag line: “the US has the best health care in the world”. Is this true? According to the World Health Organization in 2000 the US was ranked 37, behind the UK and Canada; whose health care systems are favorites when it comes to expressing what American’s don’t want (i.e. government funded health care). The Infant mortality rate is often used as an indicator of the level of health in a country. In 2006 the US was ranked number 33 (behind UK, Australia and NZ). And cost? The US has one of the highest costs of health care in the world. Even the opponents of health care reform don't dispute that.

How about access to health-care vs. coverage? Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison wrote, “They (Obama administration) are essentially gambling away health care access to achieve health care coverage”. So what is the point of having access to health-care if you don’t have coverage? This essentially means that you can get health care only if you can afford it. So would the under-insured and uninsured not have coverage if they could afford it, or is it that they can’t afford coverage and hence have no access? Let’s say you don’t have (sufficient) coverage, would you rather have coverage that allows some access to health-care, or is the fact that ‘great care is available to you’ at the expense of bankruptcy more desirable?

A ‘public health option’ would cover all citizens of the US, but the opponents of this plan say it would diminish the “best in class” health care standards of the US, due to the lack of resources. This implies that if everyone had coverage, the quality of health-care would suffer (fewer doctors, nurses and hospitals distributed amongst more people). Does that not equally imply that the majority of people that have coverage today have access to ‘better’ care at the expense of the under-insured and uninsured? Why do these people who have coverage today deserve access to care over the rest?

Preventive care vs. treatment to disease: Opponents of preventive care (yes there are opponents!) say that it is more expensive than treating patients with illness. The argument is that if you provided preventive care to all people it would cost money; but not all of these people would necessarily develop disease even if they were not provided preventive care. The opponents claim that the dollars spent on preventive care greatly exceed the dollars spent on treating only those who developed the disease. If you were a parent, would you consciously deny your child preventive care (let’s say a vaccine) and take the gamble that your child probably won’t develop the disease that the vaccine could have prevented, JUST so you could save money? Because that would put you right among the opponents of preventive care.

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