The US compared to other countries

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Hmm.. From the Commonwealth Fund:

Quality: The indicators of quality were grouped into four categories: effective care, safe care, coordinated care, and patient-centered care. Compared with the other 10 countries, the U.S. fares best on provision and receipt of preventive and patient-centered care. While there has been some improvement in recent years, lower scores on safe and coordinated care pull the overall U.S. quality score down. Continued adoption of health information technology should enhance the ability of U.S. physicians to identify, monitor, and coordinate care for their patients, particularly those with chronic conditions.

Access: Not surprisingly — given the absence of universal coverage — people in the U.S. go without needed health care because of cost more often than people do in the other countries.

Efficiency: On indicators of efficiency, the U.S. ranks last among the 11 countries, with the U.K. and Sweden ranking first and second, respectively. The U.S. has poor performance on measures of national health expenditures and administrative costs as well as on measures of administrative hassles, avoidable emergency room use, and duplicative medical testing.

Equity: The U.S. ranks a clear last on measures of equity. Americans with below-average incomes were much more likely than their counterparts in other countries to report not visiting a physician when sick; not getting a recommended test, treatment, or follow-up care; or not filling a prescription or skipping doses when needed because of costs. On each of these indicators, one-third or more lower-income adults in the U.S. said they went without needed care because of costs in the past year.

Healthy lives: The U.S. ranks last overall with poor scores on all three indicators of healthy lives — mortality amenable to medical care, infant mortality, and healthy life expectancy at age 60. Overall, France, Sweden, and Switzerland rank highest on healthy lives.

U.S. Healthcare Ranked Dead Last Compared To 10 Other Countries

The UK on top? That is surprising, we have to admit..

The Commonwealth Fund’s most recent (2011) national health system scorecard, and from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

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The United States spends almost twice as much on health care, as a percentage of its economy, as other advanced industrialized countries — totaling $3.3 trillion, or 17.9 percent of gross domestic product in 2016.
But a few decades ago American health care spending was much closer to that of peer nations. What happened?

A large part of the answer can be found in the title of a 2003 paper in Health Affairs by the Princeton University health economist Uwe Reinhardt: “It’s the prices, stupid.” The study, also written by Gerard Anderson, Peter Hussey and Varduhi Petrosyan, found that people in the United States typically use about the same amount of health care as people in other wealthy countries do, but pay a lot more for it.

Why the U.S. Spends So Much More Than Other Nations on Health Care - The New York Times

Special interests, rigged markes..

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With the sabotage of Obamacare, expect to see more of this:

She says she underwent 55 rounds of radiation, 17 rounds of chemotherapy and surgery to remove cancerous lymph nodes. Insurance refused to pay for cancer treatment Her battle was twofold: the fight for her life and the fight with her insurance company, UnitedHealthcare. 

Time was of the essence. After her lymph nodes were removed, her team of doctors wanted to target the cancerous area with a specialized treatment called proton beam therapy. Weissman had six highly esteemed oncologists advocating on her behalf, including five who also teach at Harvard Medical School and a sixth who was once named among America's top doctors by Newsweek. Aides in the offices of Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey also pressed UnitedHealthcare about covering Weissman's proton treatment. Her doctors believed that proton therapy would be the most effective treatment in curing her cancer because it could pinpoint the area around her lymph nodes without causing damage to nearby organs.

The nation's largest health insurance company, though, disagreed. UnitedHealthcare denied Weissman coverage for proton beam therapy after multiple appeals, saying "there is not enough medical evidence to show proton beam therapy is effective for your particular condition." One of the insurance medical directors who twice reviewed Weissman's appeals wasn't board-certified in "gynecologic oncology," according to the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology, raising troubling questions about why she was involved in a cancer case. The denials put Weissman in a terrible predicament: pay $95,000 out of pocket for what her doctors said was the best chance at a cure or continue with fully covered standard radiation, which could lead to lifelong complications.

When insurance wouldn't pay, parents funded cancer patient's $95,000 lifesaving treatment - CNN

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Here is the former UN Secretary General:

The US has the world’s most expensive health system, accounting for nearly one-fifth of American gross domestic product and costing more than $10,348 per American. The United Kingdom, by comparison, spends a little under 10% of GDP according to the latest available statistics, and healthcare is free at the point of delivery.
“It’s not easy to understand why such a country like the United States, the most resourceful and richest country in the world, does not introduce universal health coverage,” said Ban. “Nobody would understand why almost 30 million people are not covered by insurance.” Failing to provide health coverage, he said, was “unethical” and “politically wrong, morally wrong”. He accused the “powerful” interests of pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and doctors that “inhibit the American government” of having prevented the US from moving towards universal healthcare.

“This is for the people. Leaders are elected because they vowed that they would work for the people,” said Ban. “They are abandoning people because they are poor, then these poor people cannot find a proper medical support.” Despite astronomical spending on health, millions in the US live entirely outside the health system, uninsured and unable to go to the doctor without incurring hundreds or thousands in debt. Since President Trump was elected, an additional 4 million people have lost health coverage, according to a recent survey by the Commonwealth Fund.

Ex-UN chief Ban Ki-moon says US healthcare system is 'morally wrong' | US news | The Guardian

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Selling his Nobel Prize medal to cover medical expenses..

In a lot of ways (and as others have observed) Lederman’s story represents the best and worst of America. Lederman was born in the 1920s to a father who worked in a laundry facility. He went on to discover the Higgs boson subatomic particle, the so-called “God particle” that you can read more about here. But even an accomplished physicist and university professor isn’t immune from America’s sky-high health care prices. The United States routinely has health care prices well-above the rest of the country. A day in an American hospital, for examples, costs an average of $5,520 here — compared to $765 in Switzerland or $424 in Spain.

The cost of receiving care in a nursing home can also present a significant burden. A private room in a nursing facility costs, on average, $7,698 per month. And Medicare, which covers the vast majority of Americans over 65, generally does not cover long-term nursing care. Many Americans do end up getting Medicaid to cover nursing home bills — but that often requires selling off significant assets and dwindling down savings in order to fall below the public program’s income requirements.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Loederman sold his medal for $765,000 to pay medical bills - Vox

And here are many other glaring price differences with the rest of the (advanced) world:

Humira is an injectable medication used to treat multiple autoimmune diseases, that range from rheumatoid arthritis to psoriasis to ulcerative colitis — and one of the best-selling drugs in American history. In 2014 alone, millions of Americans spent a combined $6.5 billion on Humira prescriptions. But we probably didn’t have to. While Americans paid an average price of $2,669 for Humira, the Swiss were able to buy the exact same drug for $822 — and in the United Kingdom, patients got it for $1,362. If the United States paid what the Swiss paid for the arthritis drug, we would have spent $2 billion on Humira in 2014 rather than $6.5 billion.

• Harvoni cures hepatitis C. It also costs $10,000 more in the US than anywhere else.
  
• Need to take the cancer drug Avastin? It will cost nine times more in the United States than in Britain.
  
• An MRI costs twice as much here as in Switzerland.
  
• A day in a hospital costs $5,220 here — versus $424 in Spain.
  
• You may want to consider appendix removal in Australia — it will be about $12,000 cheaper.
  

America’s health care prices are out of control. These 11 charts prove it.

See the article for a host of charts where US cost are compared to those in Switzerland (not exactly known for its cheap prices), Spain and Australia.

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Doctors’ bills play a role in 60 percent of personal-bankruptcy filings. Venus Lockett was about to give a speech at an event she volunteered for near her home in Atlanta. She was already stressed. The previous night, she had stayed up late making her presentation, and then deleted it by mistake. As she stepped up to the podium to give her remarks, she noticed that her words were slurring. She tried to speak into the mic, but the words that came out didn’t make sense. A friend walked up and grabbed Lockett by the arm. A few people, noticing something wasn’t right, walked Lockett to another room and called an ambulance.

Lockett, who was 57 at the time and uninsured, didn’t know if she could or should refuse the ambulance ride or decide which hospital it should take her to. Paramedics sped her a few miles to Emory University Hospital Midtown, where she was held overnight. It turned out she had suffered a transient ischemic attack, or a mini-stroke. The hospital performed tests and sent her home, where she recovered fully. In May, the hospital bill arrived. Lockett was charged $26,203.62 total for “observation,” which the bill instructed her to pay within 20 days. Lockett went into a tailspin. “Dang, I knew I shouldn’t have gone to the hospital,” she remembers thinking. “But at the same time, that was really scary to me, not being able to talk.” Lockett was about to join the ranks of Americans who live with crippling amounts of medical debt.

How to Negotiate Down Your Hospital Bills - The Atlantic

More horror stories in the article, uniquely American with tens of millions uninsured and even more under-insured.

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Every two years the Commonwealth Fund provides an invaluable survey of major nations’ health care systems. America always comes in last; in the latest edition, the three leaders are Britain, Australia and the Netherlands. 
What’s remarkable about those top three is that they have radically different systems. Britain has true socialized medicine — direct government provision of health care. Australia has single-payer — it’s basically Bernie down under. But the Dutch rely on private insurance companies — heavily regulated, with lots of subsidies, but looking more like a better-funded version of Obamacare than like Medicare for All. And the Netherlands actually tops the Commonwealth Fund rankings..

Opinion | Don’t Make Health Care a Purity Test - The New York Times

The Dutch Obamacare on top..

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You should read this Twitter thread of a bewildered American experiencing healthcare in Island

[Admin]

“So you go to the doctor and then what happens?” asked AOC. “Do you just walk up and say ‘I need help’? I can’t even imagine that interaction without a credit card or some sort of cash payment”. Brewis quickly laid it out, saying: You go to the doctor and you say ‘I have this problem’. They prescribe you the medicine and you just go pick it up. That’s it. Then you go home and Google how much it would have cost in America. And that’s how you get radicalised.  AOC’s reaction drove home just how inaccessible healthcare in the US can get.  Watchers of the stream outside the US were shocked.

Twitch: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discusses the NHS during gaming livestream | indy100

• The reactions are really quite telling, the difference between free healthcare and the US system were you can be faced with monumental bills for even standard procedures (leaving out even the pre-Obama care state of affairs where you might not even get coverage), is huge.
  

[Admin]

Medicare, the federal health insurance program that covers Americans over 65, is facing an impossible dilemma: Should it cover a new and expensive medication for Alzheimer’s disease, which afflicts 6 million Americans and for which there is no existing treatment, even though the drug might not actually work? It is an enormous question. Alzheimer’s patients and other families with members who endure mild cognitive impairment that may progress to Alzheimer’s have been waiting decades for an effective treatment. For them, even a few more months of life with improved cognition, one more birthday party or a grandchild’s graduation, is the priority.

But the evidence on whether Biogen’s treatment, called aducanumab, is effective is, at best, mixed; the FDA approved it this week over the objections of its own advisory committee. And with a preliminary announced price of nearly $60,000 annually per patient, covering the treatment could cost upward of $100 billion a year, mostly to Medicare, which would almost double the program’s drug spending. Patients themselves could be on the hook for thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs. What Medicare does about aducanumab will have major ramifications not only for the millions of patients who could potentially be eligible for the drug, but for the future of US health care writ large.

The dilemma results from a feature of the American health care system: Unlike in other countries, the federal government has little room to negotiate what Medicare will pay for treatments. Independent analysts think the drug is worth more like $8,000, but Medicare has no authority to charge a lower price. Instead, the federal program is likely in effect obligated to cover the new drug now that it has FDA approval. The tools it has to make a determination about whether or not to cover aducanumab and for whom are fraught with legal and ethical risk.

Biogen’s new Alzheimer’s drug could cost Medicare billions after FDA approval - Vox