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Health Care In the United States is broken. Proposed fixes abound. Some 49 million U.S. residents have no health insurance, and the numbers keep growing. Of the 49 million Americans without health insurance, 8.7 million are children. Because employers increasingly are moving in the direction of providing Warehouse-style health coverage by shifting health care costs to employees, America’s workers struggle to pay higher premiums, deductibles and co-payments-if they can afford such coverage at all.

Health Care In the United States, is one of the top social and economic problems facing Americans today. The rising cost of medical care and health insurance is impacting the livelihood of many Americans in one way or another. The inability to pay for necessary medical care is no longer a problem affecting only the uninsured, but is increasingly becoming a problem for those with health insurance as well.

* In 2007, nearly 50 million Americans did not have health insurance, while another 25 million were underinsured. (Source: Commonwealth Fund Biennial Health Insurance Survey 2007)

* The amount people pay for health insurance increased 30 percent from 2001 to 2005, while income for the same period of time only increased 3 percent. (Source: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation)

* The total annual premium for a typical family health insurance plan offered by employers was $12,680 in 2008. (Source: Kaiser/HRET Survey of Employer-Sponsored Health Benefits, 2008)

* Healthcare expenditures in the United States exceed $2 trillion a year. (SOURCE: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Office of the Actuary, National Health Statistics Group;) In comparison, the federal budget is $3 trillion a year.

There are also the underinsured who have health insurance but, still struggle to pay their healthcare bills. Many of them are faced with rising health care premiums, deductibles, and copayments, as well as limits on coverage for various services or other limits and excluded services that can increase out-of-pocket expenses

The following statistics were part of a study conducted by the Commonwealth Fund and recently published in the online version of the Health Affairs journal:

* The number of people who are underinsured has grown 60 percent to 25 million over the past four years.

* The fastest growing area of the underinsured are middle and upper income families. The rate of underinsured for those with incomes of $40,000 or more nearly tripled, to 11 percent.

* The biggest rate of underinsurance is in families with incomes under the poverty level (about $20,000), at 31 percent.

About 50% of the bankruptcy filings in the United States are due to medical expenses. Source: Health Affairs Journal 2005

Average Life expectancy at birth in the US is an average of 78.14 years, which ranks 47th in highest total life expectancy compared to other countries. Source: CIA Factbook (2008)

Problems:

* The complicated nature Health Care In the U S , masks one basic problem: making it affordable. In addition, the rising cost of health care makes it harder for employers to provide health care to their employees. Some employers hire part-time or freelance workers instead of full-time employees to dodge health care benefit costs. Insurers can also be lax in fulfilling claims. Some physicians take few insurance plans or drop insurance altogether because insurers refuse to pay up. Many people also have problems affording prescription drugs not covered by their health care plans. The link between employment and insurance makes it difficult for the unemployed or self-employed to afford medical care.

Research:

* While the United States health care, may not be especially efficient at providing care to patients, the United States is a leader in health research, with large amounts of money spent on developing medical innovations. Most of this money comes from the for-profit health care industry. Non-profit foundations and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a government institution funded by taxpayers, provide other funding, although cuts in NIH funding have lessened that agency’s role in research.

Facts:

* Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long – sometimes more than a year – to see a specialist, to have elective surgery like hip replacements or to get radiation treatment for cancer. In England, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment. All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada.

* Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States, and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the U.K. and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colonectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.

* Breast cancer mortality is 9 percent higher, prostate cancer is 184 percent higher and colon cancer mortality among men is about 10 percent higher than in the United States.

* More than 70 percent of German, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and British adults say their health system needs either “fundamental change” or “complete rebuilding.

* Maligned as a waste by economists and policymakers naive to actual medical practice, an overwhelming majority of leading American physicians identified computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the most important medical innovations for improving patient care during the previous decade. The United States has 34 CT scanners per million Americans, compared to 12 in Canada and eight in Britain. The United States has nearly 27 MRI machines per million compared to about 6 per million in Canada and Britain

* The top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other single developed country. Since the mid-1970s, the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology has gone to American residents more often than recipients from all other countries combined. In only five of the past 34 years did a scientist living in America not win or share in the prize. Most important recent medical innovations were developed in the United States.

* Twice as many seniors in American that are below-median incomes self-report “excellent” health compared to Canadian seniors (11.7 percent versus 5.8 percent). Conversely, white Canadian young adults with below-median incomes are 20 percent more likely than lower income Americans to describe their health as “fair or poor.

We agree the health care in the US faces some serious challenges, such as escalating costs and the uninsured, Health Care In the United States compares favorably to those in other developed countries.

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