Americans paying double that of other countries, despite the US fare at the bottom of the top 10 countries.
According to the news report of Commonwealth Fund The United States perform poor in an international comparison of top 10 peer nations.
On the other hand, Americans pay nearly double that of other peer countries, the health system operations are run poorly in the health equity of the United States.
“I see the human toll of these shortcomings on a daily basis,” said Dr Joseph Betancourt, the president of the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation with a focus on healthcare research and policy.
“I see patients who cannot afford their medications … I see older patients arrive sicker than they should because they spent the majority of their lives uninsured,” said Betancourt. “It’s time we finally build a health system that delivers quality affordable healthcare for all Americans.”
However, even as high healthcare prices bite into workers’ paychecks, the economy and inflation dominate voters’ concerns. Neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump has proposed major healthcare reforms.
The Democratic presidential nominee has largely reframed healthcare as an economic issue, promising medical debt relief while highlighting the Biden administration’s successes, such as Medicare drug price negotiations.
The nominee of the Republican president says “he has a plan” to improve health infrastructure but, he has made no nay proposal for health equity in The US.
However, when asked about healthcare issues, voters overwhelmingly ranked cost at the top. The cost of drugs, doctors and insurance is the top issue for Democrats (42%) and Republicans (45%), according to Kaiser Family Foundation health system polling. Americans spend $4.5tn per year on healthcare, or more than $13,000 per person per year on healthcare, according to federal government data.
The Commonwealth Fund’s report is the 20th in their “Mirror, Mirror” series, an international comparison of the US health system to nine wealthy democracies including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the UK, Sweden, and Switzerland. The foundation calls this year’s report a “portrait of a failing US health system”.
The report shows 70 indicators from across five top operational sectors, including access to care, health equity, care process, administrative efficiency, and outcomes. The guidelines are derived from a survey conducted by the Commonwealth as well as publicly available measures from the World Health Organization, OECD, and Our World in Data.
In all but the “care process” – the domain that covers issues such as reconciling medications – the US ranked as the last or penultimate nation. Presenters for Commonwealth noted the US is often “in a class of its own” far below the nearest peer nation.
“Poverty, homelessness, hunger, discrimination, substance abuse – other countries don’t make their health systems work so hard,” said Reginald D Williams II, vice-president of the fund. He said most peer nations cover more of their citizens’ basic needs. “Too many individuals in the US face a lifetime of inequity, it doesn’t have to be this way.”
“I don’t expect we will in one fell swoop rewrite the social contract,” said Dr David Blumenthal, the fund’s past president and an author of the report. “The American electorate makes choices about which direction to move in, and that is very much an issue in this election.”