American Values Blamed For U.S. Health Care Crisis

The above headline is from the December 8, 2008 issue of the Science Daily. The feature starts off on an ominous note by stating, "To heal our ailing health care system, we need to stop thinking like Americans". The Science Daily feature is based on two articles in the October 29, 2008 issue of the journal Neurology, the journal of the American Academy of Neurology. In those articles, author, M. R. Nuwer, MD reports, "The United States has the world's most expensive health care system yet one-sixth of Americans are uninsured."

Dr. Nuwer points out several problems with this system in his articles. One of these problems is insurance companies, "Carriers spend more for their own administration and profit than on payments to physicians," Nuwer notes. Dr. Nuwer, is a professor of clinical neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He also commented in the Science Daily article, "Americans prize individual choice and resist limiting care. We believe that if doctors can treat very ill patients aggressively and keep every moment of people in the last stages of life under medical care, then they should. We choose to hold these values. Consequently, we choose to have a more expensive system than Europe or Canada."

The Science Daily article revealed some very sobering statistics on our healthcare system. They noted that the US has the world's most expensive health care system, yet only one-sixth of Americans are fully insured. This system costs over $2 trillion annually. This makes health care spending the biggest part of our economy. By comparison this is four times bigger than national defense spending. The U.S. government is projecting that we will spend $4 trillion on health care by 2015 which will represent 20 percent of the nation's gross domestic product.

The Science Daily article also reported that in his paper, Dr. Nuwer, explained that 31 percent of U.S. health care expenditures go toward administration. "We push a lot of paper," Nuwer says. "We spend twice as much as Canada, which has a more streamlined health care system that demands doctors complete less paperwork." Nuwer also notes that we waste another 10% on, "defensive medicine" in which doctors order tests and procedures to cover themselves legally. "Doctors don't want to be accused in court of a delayed diagnosis, so they bend over backwards to find something, even if it's a rare possibility, in order to cover themselves," Nuwer says.

Another article on a similar concept from the December 7, 2008 Star Tribune in Minneapolis listed "5 Misconceptions About Health Care" that helped clarify this issue. These are:

1. America has the best health care in the world. We have the most expensive system, but by most international measures we are far down the list on actual health care delivery.
2. Somebody else is paying for your health insurance. This is not true as we pay for health care either in taxes or as a deduction from salary.
3. We would save a lot if we could cut the administrative waste of private insurance. This point is debatable as some say that this cost is needed while others compare this with other countries that have considerably less administrative costs.
4. Health-care reform is going to cost a bundle. Volumes can be written on this subject. However, the bottom line is that we are already paying for a wasteful system that leaves out a large portion of our population. If the rest of the world can offer health care at a fraction of the cost, why can't we?
5. Americans aren't ready for a major overhaul of the health-care system. The Star Tribune article answered this item by reporting that the, "New England Journal of Medicine found that only 7 percent of Americans rate our health-care system excellent. Nearly 40 percent consider it poor. A whopping 70 percent believe it needs major changes, if not a complete overhaul." This pretty much says it all. We are ready!