Voices: Health care

June 21, 2009 08:30 pm

— In his column “Health-care solutions need investigating,” (Globe, June 19), Konrad Heid asks, “Why is there suddenly such an urgency to reform health care here in the United States?” Well, here are some points to ponder:
First, the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions in its “2009 Survey of Health Care Consumers” found that, “Nearly 40 percent of consumers have expressed discontent with the status quo, rating the U.S. health-care system a D or an F.” The World Health Organization (WHO), in 2000, ranked the U.S. health care system as first in cost, 37th in overall performance, and 72nd by overall level of health (among 191 member nations in the study). In a 2006 study, WHO reported that the U.S. ranked 43rd in adult mortality, 40th in infant mortality and 30th in life expectancy.
But, our current health-care system has other consequences too. According to a “HealthGrades Patient Safety in American Hospitals” study, an average of 195,000 people are killed by hospitals each year due to “potentially preventable, in-hospital medical errors.” And, a 2004 report from the Institute of Medicine notes that, “Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States.”
I think Dr. Quentin Young of the Physicians for a National Health Program puts it best: “The paradox is that the costliest health system in the world performs so poorly. We waste one-third of every health care dollar on insurance bureaucracy and profits while two million people go bankrupt annually and we leave 45 million uninsured.”
I think the real debate here is whether government has an ethical duty to provide health care to its citizens or whether health care more properly belongs on a profit-and-loss statement. Every other highly industrialized nation in the world has settled on the former. Anyone willing to bet that Congress will throw our free-market system under the bus for the sake of universal health care?
Herb Van Fleet
Tulsa and
former Joplin resident