One reason why improving our health-care system is so difficult:
However, there’s another reason why Washington is reluctant to attempt major surgery: For the 158 million or so Americans who are covered by private health insurance, the system works reasonably well and doesn’t need fixing.Despite all the talk of health-care system failures and the growing number of people who have no health insurance, polls consistently show that Americans rate concerns about health care behind terrorism, the Iraq war and jobs.
The health care system “is working well for a lot of people,” said Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin, a health economist at the Rand Corp., a California-based think tank.
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The people who it is working for tend to be, well, voters, have higher incomes, work in the media and include almost 100% of the folk in DC (or your state) who set public policy.
Plus the healthcare systems seems to work well for anyone that is healthy. It’s when you’re sick and have no insurance that the big trouble starts. I’d guess that this population is well under 10% of the total US population, and also tends to have lower income, voter participation, and media visability.
The other major problem (I’m sure there are alot more) is that people in the US think there are unlimited resources in healthcare. To pull numbers out of my a**, something like 40% of the healthcare budget is spent on less than 5% of the patients.
For some interesting reading I suggest checking out the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) over in the UK. They are doing some interesting economic work on how to spread their limited healthcare dollar (drugs, devices and procedures).
http://www.nice.org.uk/page.aspx?o=appraisals.completed
- jeet
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