Kimberly J. Morgan Quotes
Most other rich countries not only spend less than the United States on health care; they also achieve better outcomes in both coverage and quality.
The United States in a few medical areas (such as treating breast cancer) is the best in the world but on almost all general medical criteria we are not at, and sometimes not near, the top. Dramatic examples are infant mortality and even life expectancy where we are not even as good as Costa Rica. A large proportion of the infant mortality lies within the women who do not have health insurance and hence have little or no pre-natal care. The smaller life expectancy is partially a function of the high infant mortality rate, but is also brought down by the large American prevalence of smoking, heart disease, cancer, traffic deaths, alcohol-related deaths and gun deaths,
Kimberly J. Morgan, Political Scientist, “America’s Misguided Approach To Social Welfare”, Foreign Affairs, January / February 2013
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In some areas, the United States has the best performance in the entire world—length of survival rates for breast cancer and some other diseases for example. However, on basic medical services, like infant mortality, we have a poorer record than all the other industrialized countries. Cuba and Costa Rica are better than us in this area and their citizens actually have a longer life expectancy than Americans. Emmanuel makes the argument that the cost differential between US health care and other—even better systems—is so great that we can easily save money and reform our system without rationing medical care or wait in lines for surgery. However, to do so, there must be huge reforms and few in the system want to risk changing anything. It is hard for most Americans to face the fact that other countries offer obvious medical superiority in many areas. For example, in France, if you call their emergency telephone number for a medical emergency a doctor answers the phone, not an operator with only modest medical knowledge. When a French ambulance is dispatched, it does not have emergency medical technicians only, but there is a doctor and a nurse in the ambulance. And the ambulance itself is equipped to do emergency surgery of other critical treatment if time is critical.
At the time in America, the insurance companies only paid out less than 80 percent of all the money they took in for health insurance. More than 20 percent went into their high overhead and profits. In contrast, to the 20 percent or more that it costs with insurance companies to administer health insurance payments, the agency that performs the same function for Medicare doe so with only a 6 percent cost Sanders argued that by getting rid of the insurance companies, the nation could save about 14 percent of the entire insured medical bills for the nation—many billions of dollars which would reduce average health insurance premiums by 14 percent. Opponents argue that the would be a socialist system and give too much potential control of individual health matters to a government operated or government controlled organizations. Politicians, in order to look good with the voters, would lower premiums and also pay out less either shortchanging doctors and hospitals or rating medial care somehow.
