When Politicians Stop Caring About Health Care
Editor in Chief
With President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address and House Representative Cathy McRodgers’ response, health insurance plans are once again shoved into the limelight. However, what many fail to address in the squabble over the Affordable Care Act, colloquially known as Obamacare, is that the American health care system is far more deeply flawed than is commonly presented.
Hospital bills charge for tests, dressings, care by length of stay, drugs, therapy and various other services that rack up thousands of dollars in charges that devastate the uninsured and underinsured. There is no set standard for how much a hospital service costs. According to Forbes, the average cost of treatment for a patient at the Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in New York is $7,044, while the average cost at the Bayonne Hospital Center in New Jersey is $99,690. The two hospitals are less than 20 miles away from each other.
In a society driven by greed, both hospitals and private insurance corporations have disregarded ethical standards. When hospital costs go up, so do insurance premiums, resulting in net gain for both parties. Neither really checks or balances the other as it should, meaning that costs simply keep steadily increasing while patients must either pay hefty sums for their treatments or be denied care because they cannot afford to pay.
Compared to other nations, America charges far more for hospital care, to an extent that has become downright ludicrous. According to the Washington Post, each day a person spends in an American hospital could mean anywhere from another $1,514 to $12,537 added onto the bill, while the cost per day in Argentina, Spain, South Africa, the Netherlands, France and Chile is under $1,000. Despite the enormous disparity between costs in the U.S. and costs elsewhere, our health care is not significantly better in terms of quality, and even the same brand-name drugs that are used elsewhere can cost up to five times more here.
Something to keep in mind is that not all countries spend equally, since income disparities do exist, meaning that residents of richer nations will spend more. However, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Americans have around the same income level as people from Switzerland, yet we spend $3,000 more per person per year on health expenditure than they do. Spending on hospitals, physicians, dentists, pharmaceuticals and administration in the health care system is higher in the U.S. than in many other OECD nations as well.
What House Republicans need to realize is that instead of fruitlessly attempting to repeal an act that they have failed to remove or defund in over 40 instances, they should be working together to fix a corrupt health care system that takes advantage of the lack of governmental regulations. Making sure that citizens are adequately insured is an important issue, but Congress has become so fixated and single-minded about Obamacare that they repeatedly waste time that could be spent figuring out how to centralize hospital prices the way other countries do so that costs don’t fluctuate wildly.
In essence, the root of America’s health care problem resides in more than how citizens come about their insurance, and until Congress learns how to do its job, we are left waiting for change, watching as the U.S. continues to fall behind in progress and hoping with our fingers crossed that the hospitals we should be able to trust don’t drive us into bankruptcy.