universal healthcare in us

The Paradox of America Health System

The Untold Story of America 's Health Care Crisis , by Jonathan Cohn . A woman in California called Nelene died of breast cancer after her insurance company turned down support for a bone marrow transplant . In a countless series of such episode , a family whose son went into a state of cardiac secondary to coronary heart disease were forced to take him to a hospital 45 miles away on their insurance carrier 's s . He survived the attacked , but suffered a permanent defect that more emergency treatment

might have definitely averted . Furthermore , a day old infant called Bryan Jones whose scenario was trumpeted all over the media at the moment of the incidence died of undetected cardiac defect when the insurance company kicked the family out of the hospital . Early detection of the defect soon after the birth might have spotted out the problem (Sicko , June 2007

America 's health system is simply paradoxical in administration . In medical technology and in the scientific understanding of disease , it is simply the best . Since doctors are better paid than anywhere else in the world , the country attracts the best of practitioners . And yet many , if not most , Americans are unable to benefit of the advantages of this . In fact , as The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has argued , the very proliferation of research and high-tech equipment is part of the reason for the imbalance in coverage between the privileged few and the increasingly underserved masses "[The system] compensates for higher spending on insiders , in party , by consigning more people to outsider status --robbing Peter of basic care in to pay for Paul 's state-of-the-art treatment " Krugman wrote recently "Thus we have the cruel paradox that medical progress is bad for many Americans ' health

The Economy Loss

Having the system run by for-profit insurance companies turns out to be inefficient and expensive as well as humiliating . America disburses twice as much per capita on health care as France , and almost two and a half times as much as Britain . And yet it falls down in almost every key indicator of public health , starting , perhaps , most shockingly , with infant mortality , which is 36 per cent higher than in Britain

McKinsey , a consulting firm estimated the excess costs of managing private insurance spheres - scouting for business , processing claims and hiring "denial management specialists " to tell people why their ailment is not covered by their policy - at about 98bn a year . This is significantly more than the 80bn McKinsey calculates it would cost to cover every uninsured American citizen . Government could perhaps negotiate bulk procure of drugs , rather than permitting the pharmaceutical industries to bill citizen on exorbitant fee , this would in addition save a huge 66bn

Astonishingly , serious debate about health issues in the United States since Bill Clinton , with considerable input from his wife Hillary , tried and failed to overhaul the system in 1994 . May be as part of change as the 2008 presidential race heats up...