U.S. Has Worst Health Care Despite Spending the Most On It

Graded across 71 performance measures, the U.S. ranked last on access to care, administrative efficiency, equity, and health care outcomes. The nations surveyed in the analysis were Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which has consistently ranked last in the seven comparative reports the nonprofit organization has published since 2004.

Comparing income groups, the report found, “U.S. disparities are especially large when looking at financial barriers to accessing medical and dental care, medical bill burdens, difficulty obtaining after-hours care, and use of web portals to facilitate patient engagement.”

Higher-income Americans have a harder time accessing care than lower-income patients in other countries that provide universal coverage, the report’s lead author, Dr. Eric Schneider, told Marketplace this week. “The U.S. is such a low performer on several of these measures that if health care were an Olympic sport, it’s not clear the U.S. would even qualify to compete,” he said.

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{In February 2020, the journal Lancet published a study finding that a single-payer system would save more than 68,000 lives and $450 billion a year. A 2018 study by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst found that at a cost of around $2.93 trillion per year, Medicare for All would reduce health care spending by $5.1 trillion over 10 years compared to the status quo.

In 2019, policy analyst Matt Bruenig calculated from U.S. Census data that a single-payer system would reduce poverty by about 22 percent. “8 million of the nation’s 42.5 million poor people would not be poor if they did not have to pay medical out-of-pocket expenses like deductibles, copays, coinsurance, and self-payments,” he wrote. Economics professors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman calculated that year that an individual with $50,000 in income would receive a net gain of $11,000 under Medicare for All.

The health services industry spent $52.7 million on federal lobbying in the first half of this year, according to OpenSecrets, with nearly two-thirds of lobbyists formerly having worked in the government.}

Do you want to know where our representation is on this? They're all working for a promotion to with nearly two-thirds of lobbyists formerly having worked in the government this. Because they all would like a piece of health services industry spent $52.7 million on federal lobbying this. If it doesn't come from the healthcare industry, there's more industries providing the same potential.