I recently heard a friend comment that he saw no need for significant reform of our health care system. After all, he and his family always had outstanding care meeting his every expectation. To which I should have replied, “Yes, but you donated enough to your hospital system that they have named a wing of the place after you.”
Another acquaintance, a business leader, expressed a similar feeling about American health care, calling it “pretty dang good.”
Years ago, before I began my medical training at the University of Utah School of Medicine, I too had a sanguine view of business as usual in U.S. health care. I felt that, as a newly accepted medical student, I was joining the leading profession in the country that led the world in caring for patients.
But then the sad realities of for-profit health care began to be evident. I wrote about my transition to single payer activist in my books “The Purple World: Healing the Harm in American Health Care” and “For the Hurt of My People: Original Conservatism and Better, Simpler Health Care.” After my transition to single payer health reform advocate, I produced a documentary film about the awful situation many American patients confront as they desperately try to get needed care for themselves and their families. The film, “Healing US,” begins with the story of patient neglect in an emergency room leading to the death of a young woman because she had no health insurance. This kind of death is commonplace in America — it happens 68,000 times each year.
Nicholas Kristof recently asked a question in the New York Times: “How do we fix the scandal that is American health care?” Here, in part, is how he described the scandal: “It’s not just that life expectancy in Mississippi (71.9) now appears to be a hair shorter than in Bangladesh (72.4). Nor that an infant is some 70% more likely to die in the United States than in other wealthy countries. Nor even that for the first time in probably a century, the likelihood that an American child will live to the age of 20 has dropped … America’s dismal health care outcomes are a disgrace. They shame us. Partly because of diabetes and other preventable conditions, Americans suffer unnecessarily and often die young. It is unconscionable that newborns in India, Rwanda and Venezuela have a longer life expectancy than Native American newborns (65) in the United States. And Native American males have a life expectancy of just 61.5 years — shorter than the overall life expectancy in Haiti.”
Every other developed nation is better at preventing deaths that are caused by treatable conditions than the U.S. No other developed nation has personal and family bankruptcy due to the cost of illness and injury care while 500,000 such financial disasters happen in America each year, mostly to people who had insurance when they became sick or injured. No other nation comes close to spending as much as we Americans do for health care. Most of that spending is public money appropriated for health care. Those growing health care appropriations are crowding out the funding of other needed services such as education, public safety and hygiene and our infrastructure. We spend more on health care because we have a poor quality health care system that is inefficiently financed, both of which are problems which can be fixed.
So to my friend and acquaintance, both of whom grossly misunderstand the dereliction of American for-profit health care, U.S. health care is pretty dang bad. Take the blinders off and look around. Our society needs better quality care, efficiently financed, that funds all medically necessary care for all of our citizens.
Here in Utah we are mobilizing to solve this most urgent of domestic issues. Join us at Common Sense Health Care for Utah, and let’s learn to care for each other.
Joseph Q. Jarvis
Joseph Q. Jarvis, MD, MSPH, is the chairman of the Board of Directors for Common Sense Health Care for Utah, a 501c4 non-profit organization planning to bring real and sustainable health system reform to the Utah electorate by ballot initiative in 2026.