A Healthier You

The U.S. health care system is overweight with ill-gotten profits and has arteries screaming for reform.


While America is great - even the greatest! - at many things, we've fumbled with our health care system for long enough. An astonishing 15 percent of all Americans do not have health insurance. That's the equivalent to every Hispanic American not having insurance. It is unacceptable for one of the world's most developed nations to disregard the health and lives of so many of its citizens.

In short, our health care system is a quagmire of regulations and directives not easily translated into English! American workers pay increasingly higher premiums, deductibles and co-payments, in a system that dictates which doctors you can and cannot visit. Health care spending is about 15 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the United States. To see how we match up against other countries, examine the graph below:

As you look at the graph, you see that Life Expectancy increases as you move higher up the vertical axis. Health care spending in "international dollars" (a fancy method of equalizing country currencies in order to compare them...on an 'apples to apples' basis) is along the horizontal access as you move from left to right. In an ideal scenario, you want to be a country that is higher than the others (your citizens live longer because they are presumably healthier) and towards the left (your citizens get healthier at a lower cost than others). Looking at the graph, Cuba and Japan are two great candidates for having the world's best health care systems. In essence, Cubans and Japanese pay less for good health care that helps them to live longer. The United States has comparable life expectancies, but pays much more money to live longer. Sierra Leone is our polar opposite, as its citizens can't afford enough quality health care so the average life expectancies are lower.

There are many reasons why some countries can provide better health care for its people. Some places are ideally located, so access to clean water, an abundance of fruits and vegetables produced and favorable climate are naturally occurring resources that encourage healthier living in places like Costa Rica and South Africa. Poverty, however, is the primary discriminator between who is healthy and who is not, no matter where you live. This is the case especially in America where we have high economic inequalities by income, education, race, et cetera. Here, high quality health care is available only to those who can afford it.

Enter U.S. President Barack Obama. In recent stops across the nation, he has revealed that his version of health care reform will cover the approximately 45 million Americans that are uninsured and will cost about $1 trillion dollars over the next ten years. If it sounds like a lot of money, it is! To this, the President says:

Failing to reform our health care system in a way that genuinely reduces cost growth will cost us trillions of dollars more in lost economic growth and lower wages.

The bigger issue, of course, is how is he going to pay for it. In his June 13th weekly address he proposed major cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, he has also said that taxes will go up and [unnecessary] health care spending will fall.

There is a wealth of information - and opinion - on America's Health Care Reform plans. Educate yourself here first, then come back to our blog to continue the discussion!