Of all the lies being peddled about healthcare in America, none is more egregious than the claim that the American system is the “best in the world”. For the wealthy who can afford the most expensive procedures and the best doctors, and for the Beltway politicians who get gold-plated government insurance, the American system is pretty good: they get the best the system has to offer, and the cream of the crop in America is often the cream of the crop in the world.
But only a small sliver of Americans get this high-quality care; for the rest of us, American healthcare ranges from adequate to downright horrible. Over the last decade I have heard numerous horror stories about medical care in the States, and some of it I have experienced firsthand. Our fellow citizens are routinely misdiagnosed, given the wrong medicines, overcharged for emergency services, and treated rudely and unprofessionally. Only last week, an 84 year-old friend of a friend was refused admission to a hospital and left out in the cold by himself, only to die the next day; his family is now considering suing the hospital. On a national level, the end result is needless suffering and hundreds of billions of wasted dollars.
Bottom line: Overall, the American healthcare system is mediocre by the standards of developed countries.
Doctors are generally good people who invest a significant number of their best years getting extremely expensive medical training in order to practice their craft. How is it that so many of them end up supporting a broken system that doesn’t promote public health? For one, the incentives in the system are so skewed that even those with the best intentions can get caught up in a web of excessive testing, extreme levels of bureaucracy, defensive medicine based on liability concerns, and the stress that comes from a system that pits insurance companies against patients.
But more fundamentally, the American healthcare system is a private market that thrives off patients’ sicknesses; there is simply less money to be made from keeping people healthy. Some societies reward doctors for keeping their patients healthy. Not ours: a cancer patient who needs endless tests and therapy is the best money-maker, so even the most well-intentioned medical professionals have their priorities skewed (whether consciously or not).
The only way to even attempt to correct the perverse incentives in the healthcare industry is through greater government involvement. As Paul Krugman points out, the only reason healthcare in America works at all is because of government intervention. A purely private healthcare market will always be a disaster, not only at the treatment level but at the research level: money will pour into cures for baldness and impotence, not into proper nutrition.
Those who call the American healthcare system the best in the world are trying to defend a clearly broken status quo. In addition, they simply don’t realize the extent to which we need government to correct this unsustainable situation: a situation in which needless suffering is the norm, not the exception.
Jason Scorse