What's actually wrong with the US health system
A new report shows why American health care performs so poorly compared with its rivals — and suggests the Obamacare replacement proposals aren’t the way to fix it.
On the heels of the Senate’s latest attempt at replacing the Affordable Care Act, the Commonwealth Fund has released its latest evaluation of what, exactly, ails the U.S. health-care system. Once again, the think tank found the U.S. medical system performed the worst among 11 similar countries, all while spending more.
The U.S. fared especially badly on measures of affordability, access, health outcomes, and equality between the rich and poor. The United Kingdom ranked first, and the other countries in the comparison were Australia, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Germany, Canada, and France.
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Simplifying insurance, meanwhile, could make it better. For example, American doctors spend a comparatively abnormal amount of time on “getting patients needed medications or treatment because of coverage restrictions,” the Commonwealth Fund finds, and having patients who are signed up for plans that don’t cover certain conditions or procedures, or that demand high deductibles from them before care is provided, would not remedy that.
But, according to this report, a single-payer system is not necessarily the only way to go. One of the top performers in the Commonwealth Fund’s model is the Netherlands, a country where insurers are predominantly private companies who sell their plans to customers, many of whom are subsidized by the federal government. In other words, it looks like Obamacare on steroids.
In the Netherlands, insurance is considered a social service, and it’s much more heavily regulated than in the U.S. People are required to buy insurance, just like under Obamacare, and so less than 1 percent of the population is uninsured. (The Senate bill would eliminate the individual mandate.) Premiums are funded in part through payroll taxes and in part through subsidies that much of the population receives, according to a 2009 paper by Washington and Lee University Law professor Timothy Jost. The list of essential benefits is generous and also regulated by the government. Rather than allow insurers to pick only the healthiest customers to insure, the Dutch government redistributes the risk among insurers by making those with healthier risk pools pay into a pot of money that other, less fortunate insurers can draw from.
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http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/healthcare/whats-actually-wrong-with-the-us-health-system/ar-BBEoTf8?li=BBnbfcN&ocid=edgsp
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