Don't Ask, Don't Know

In one of yesterday's posts, an old friend commented that it is "the questions that we do not know to ask that are the most important." This struck me as particularly true especially in regards to an article I read on Salon yesterday about healthcare in America.

The article by Joe Conason was entitled "The questions our healthcare debate ignores" with a deck that asked the following questions:
Why does every developed nation except the U.S. have universal healthcare? Why do they pay half as much in medical costs? Why are their infant mortality and longevity statistics superior?

One of the articles strongest points, in my opinion, was this:

Last month, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development issued the latest in a long series of reports on our wasteful and cruel practices that ought to awaken a sense of national embarrassment. This highly topical study carried a deceptively bland title: "Healthcare Reform in the United States." Naturally, the mainstream media and punditry ignored its findings (although OECD reports promoting free trade often receive wide coverage).

Documenting the gross "discrepancy" between the enormous amounts that Americans spend on healthcare and the value received for that expenditure, the study found that the United States ranks poorly among OECD countries on measures of life expectancy, infant mortality and reductions in "amenable mortality," meaning deaths "from certain causes that should not occur in the presence of timely and effective healthcare."

(emphasis mine)

He goes on to add that of the 30 members of the OECD group that conducted the study only three do not offer their residents universal health coverage—the United States, Mexico and Turkey. Conason continues:

So we pay a lot more in taxes devoted to medical care—not including insurance premiums, co-payments, fees, and other health costs—than taxpayers in those 27 countries that have universal coverage.

How much less? Nations with comparable standards of living like France, Germany, Sweden, Finland, the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, and Japan spend roughly between half and two-thirds per capita what we spend annually. They cover everyone and their results are measurably better. And the supposed downsides of universal coverage, such as lack of access to sophisticated medical technologies, are belied in many of these countries. For instance Japan has lower per capita health expenditures than the United States (and universal coverage,) but its citizens have greater access to MRI machines, CT scanners and kidney dialysis equipment than Americans do.

This all hits home even more since the Broad household just received a bill for the spouse's first colonoscopy this weekend. And what a bill it was! When I called the insurance company to inquire as to why it was so high—he went to an in-network doc, he's over the age of 50–I was told that because a polyp was found and removed, he had TWO procedures that day, each costing over $1,000. Basically the insurance only covers one procedure. Kind of leaves you in a bit of a pickle doesn't it?

So it is nice to see that Obama is asking some questions about healthcare, but it strikes me that we still have a long way to go in terms of asking the hard stuff when it comes to how we take care of our residents.