Unless you’re extremely wealthy and live in an elitist bubble, you probably don’t need a study to tell you the American health care system is not working. But you may not have known just how poorly it stacks up to other wealthy countries.
Compared with nine other high-income nations, the United States ranked last overall this year, with a lower life expectancy and higher rates of death and disease despite spending the most on health care, according to the report, released Thursday by the independent research group The Commonwealth Fund.
The three top-performing countries in the report were Australia, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
“This report reveals that our health system is continuing to lag far behind other nations when it comes to meeting our citizens’ basic health care needs. The US spends more on health care than any other country, and Americans are sicker, die younger and struggle to afford essential health care. We spend the most and get the least for our investment,” Dr. Joseph Betancourt, president of The Commonwealth Fund, said in a news briefing.
Betancourt is also a primary care doctor. He said in the briefing that he sees the consequences of our health care failures every day: “I have patients who need medications they can’t afford. I spend time going back and forth with insurance companies who have denied care I know my patients need, and I see older patients who arrive sicker than they should because they’ve spent the majority of their lives uninsured."
Kamala Harris has concrete proposals to improve our health care system. Donald Trump, despite four years as president and nearly two years as a presidential candidate again, only has “concepts of a plan.”
