Reference no: EM133570038

Question: According to the World Health Organization, approximately 2 billion people are "facing catastrophic or impoverishing health spending." The CDC reports that in the United States 8.4 percent or 27.6 million Americans were without health insurance in 2022 - and as is well known being uninsured can often mean confronting devastating medical bills. So much so that medical expenses directly cause 66.5 percent of bankruptcies, making it the leading cause for bankruptcy. Furthermore, medical problems that lead to work loss cause 44 percent of bankruptcies. Seventeen percent of adults with health care debt declared bankruptcy or lost their home as a result of such debt. In 2021, uninsured nonelderly adults were over twice as likely as those with private coverage to have had problems paying medical bills in the past 12 months. In fact, the average age of a medical bankruptcy filer is just under 50 years old.

The United States spent 17.8 percent of its GDP on health care in 2021 - that is nearly twice as much as the average OECD country. We spend 3 to 5 times more on healthcare than South Korea, New Zealand and Japan. And yet the US is the only high-income country that does not guarantee health coverage; and the only such country where a large segment of the population is without any form of health insurance. As the WHO states: "Protecting people from the financial consequences of paying for health services out of their own pockets reduces the risk that people will be pushed into poverty because unexpected illness requires them to use up their life savings, sell assets, or borrow - destroying their futures and often those of their children."

With everything we are spending on healthcare Americans generally have worse health outcomes than the citizens of rich European countries, for example. According to the Commonwealth Fund, "life expectancy at birth in the U.S. was 77 years in 2020 - three years lower than the OECD average." Moreover, significant racial and ethnic disparities exist where it comes to health and well-being in the United States. For example, black and American Indian/Alaska Native people live fewer years, on average, than white people; they are also likelier to diefrom treatable conditions, to die or suffer serious complications during or after pregnancy, and to lose children in infancy. In fact, black women are three times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes as white women.

The Century Foundation observes: "Due to systemic racism and discrimination at the individual level, Black women and birthing people face unacceptable (and mostly preventable) risk during childbirth and throughout and after pregnancy." With nearly 24 deaths per 100,000 live births, the rate of maternal mortality is significantly higher in the US relative to rich European countries. In France it is 8, in Sweden 5, and in Spain 3. In the US, more than 700 pregnant women and new mothers die each year. A 2023 study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, has shown that the rate of maternal mortality is continuing to rise in the US: between 1999 and 2019, maternal mortality more than doubled. But while rates increased for people of all ethnicities, there were and continue to be major disparities. Black people have consistently confronted higher rates of maternal mortality; and American Indian/Alaska Native communities "witnessed an alarming surge: state median rates more than tripled."

Meanwhile, health insurance companies are raking in record profits: according to beckerspayer.com, the "largest insurers, UnitedHealth Group and Elevance Health, reported profits that were 28 percent and 7 percent higher than the same period last year, respectively. UnitedHealth raked in $5.3 billion, while Elevance took in $1.6 billion." Indeed, this country does not really have a health care system, only a health insurance system. This is the result of treating healthcare as a commodity and not as a fundamental human right. "In the United States, we cannot enjoy the right to health care," as the American Bar Association points out, "[o]ur country has a system designed to deny, not support, the right to health." We must all come to recognize, as Ted Kennedy rightly observed, that "Healthcare is not a commodity. It is not a gift to be rationed based on the ability to pay."