By Leana S. Wen
Published: Wednesday, January 21, 2004
Article Tools: Page 1 of 2
As the specter of the presidential elections looms before our country, it is imperative for us to remind ourselves and our leaders about the crisis of healthcare in the US. Our healthcare system is failing. We spend more than twice per capita as any other country, yet we stand alone among industrialized countries as the only country that does not offer access to healthcare as a right to all of our residents. We allow 43 million Americans (that's 1 in 6 people), including 10 million children, to be uninsured. Many more millions of people are underinsured with huge gaps in their coverage.
The lack of access to comprehensive and preventative healthcare has huge impacts on the quality and duration of life. The 43 million uninsured people are forced to go without regular checkups and forced to receive safety net care, presenting to emergency rooms only when an easily preventable problem has reached often fatal states. Sadly, the money that can be used to treat the uninsured is currently being wasted on needless paperwork. Because we have thousands of insurance companies, each with different regulations, 25 cents of every dollar goes toward administrative costs. In the federally-funded Medicare system, only 3 cents of every dollar goes to non-clinical costs, ensuring that 97 percent go directly to treating patients.
Our current healthcare delivery system is bad for patients and expensive for the country. As a medical student who witnesses the inequities in our system every day, I am appalled that the US does not recognize healthcare as a basic human right. Rather, healthcare is regarded as a commodity that can be bought like a VCR or TV. But unlike other commodities, access to medical treatment is not optional and cannot wait. Provision of services should not be based on ability to pay but on medical necessity. Our broken system is morally reprehensible for the world's wealthiest democracy; it is bad medicine and bad economics. It is time for us to fix it. |
