Thursday, October 31, 2013

Healthcare still comes at a premium

Barack Obama has accepted "full responsibility" for ensuring the troubled healthcare website gets fixed. He said he was "not happy" about the glitch-laden project, but made a full-throated defence of the broader 2010 healthcare law.

Obama is party to one of the greatest scams and con-tricks that has duped the American working class.

Researchers from Harvard Medical School say the lack of medical insurance coverage can be tied to about 45,000 deaths a year in the United States — a toll that is greater than the number of people who die each year from kidney disease.

People without health insurance had a 40 percent higher risk of death than those with private health insurance — as a result of being unable to obtain necessary medical care. The risk appears to have increased since 1993, when a similar study found the risk of death was 25 percent greater for the uninsured.

The increase in risk, according to the study, is likely to be a result of at least two factors. One is the greater difficulty the uninsured have today in finding care, as public hospitals have closed or cut back on services. The other is improvements in medical care for insured people with treatable chronic conditions like high blood pressure. The researchers also concluded individuals need the access to hospitals and specialists that comes only with adequate insurance coverage.

“As health care for the insured gets better, the gap between the insured and uninsured widens,” Dr. Woolhandler said. “Health insurance can only make you healthier if you have access to care,” she said.

 If the U.S. could improve its preventable death rate to match that of the three best-performing countries—France, Australia, and Italy—84,000 fewer people would have died each year by the end of the period studied.

According to the study's authors, the United States' poor performance and relatively slow improvement compared with other nations may be attributable to "the lack of universal coverage and high costs of care."

"Cross-national comparisons consistently find that people in the U.S. have a harder time getting and paying for the health care they need than people in other countries," said Commonwealth Fund President Karen Davis.

A report in 2013 by the  US Health in International Perspective, documents the failure of the US health care system. In summary: "Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people: even highly advantaged Americans are in worse health than their counterparts in other, 'peer' countries."

Health insurers make their profits from charging the highest premiums they can and by restricting and denying payment for care. They want to take in as much money as they can, while paying out as little on health care as possible. They have many tools with which to do this, and they've successfully skirted regulations for decades. When they can't make a profit, they simply pull that product from the shelf and create new products. With the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also called "Obamacare," the industries that profit from our current health care system wrote the legislation, heavily influenced the regulations and have received waivers exempting them from provisions in the law.  This has all been done to protect and enhance their profits.  the 2008 election it could not be ignored. It was a major topic of the presidential campaigns. The health industries invested heavily in  Barack Obama who in the 2008 election overwhelmingly received more in donations from health care-related industries than any of the other candidates.

Fewer people, even those with health insurance, can afford the health care they need because of out-of-pocket costs. The ACA continues that trend by pushing skimpy health plans with low coverage and restricted networks. This is what happens in a market-based system of health care. People get only the amount of health care they can afford, rather than what they need. The ACA takes our failed market-based system to a whole new level by forcing the uninsured to purchase private health plans and using the government to sell and subsidize them. The ACA required states to create new marketplaces for insurance called exchanges or else the federal government would create the exchange. In essence, the federal government is using billions of public dollars to finance the exchanges, hire people to sell insurance and subsidize the purchases.

The ACA is that it entrenches a market-based system that treats health care as a commodity and profit center for Wall Street. The big drivers of the rising cost of health care - insurance, pharmaceuticals and for-profit hospitals - continue. The wealth divide that is a major byproduct of neoliberal economics is institutionalized by law under the ACA. Health care is at the center of the conflict of our times, the battle between the people and corporate interests, the battle to put people and planet before profits.

The full story can be read at Truth Out website

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