Ashok Dhillon
Mar 14, 20174 min
Updated: Feb 15
The American Health-Care system is one of the worst in the developed World. It ranks consistently far down the list of the best developed and even some under-developed country’s health care systems. And it’s not cheap, in fact it’s one of the most expensive per capita, yet, it belongs to the richest, most powerful, and one of the most innovative problem solving countries in the World.
Source: OECD Health Statistics
So what gives?
Decades of emotional and heated political rhetoric has resulted in hardly any improvement in the system as far as coverage of the American population and cost per policy goes. President Obama was the only President that managed to push through reforms of any consequence, in decades, that increased coverage significantly to those that hadn’t had any. But, it was against the unified and determined opposition of the Republican Party that did everything possible to prevent the reformed system (termed ‘ObamaCare’) from coming into effect. But it did, and 20 Million more Americans who did not have health care coverage had health care insurance coverage for the first time.
Under a polarized political contention and opposition that only the American system can muster in a two party political system, ObamaCare was rolled out with plenty of start-up technical problems, and later on systemic problems that raised costs and needed to be systematically addressed and rectified, was consistently rejected out-of-hand by the Republican Party whose undeserving vitriol against the plan was only matched by the equally undeserved vitriol against the first African American President. (By the way, the former President makes the current one look like the idiotic, shallow, incompetent fool that he really is, saying outrageously stupid things like ‘no one knew health care was really complicated, no one!’).
But this is America, where proper health care for everyone isn’t an American citizen’s right, or a real goal for that matter, but a political/commercial football, where health care is big business with some of the most powerful lobby groups on earth that live off of almost unaccountable expenditures on health services that are almost twice the cost per capita, of all the most developed countries. Fixing and improving ObamaCare was completely out of the question, ideologically, politically and commercially, so after promising coverage ‘for everyone – and cheaper’, dismantling something that almost worked, and bringing in something that is laughably un-workable (not only it doesn’t cover everyone but uncovers most that received coverage under ObamaCare, and is more expensive for the first decade for those that need it the most), was the brilliant Republican response.
And waiting in the wings, salivating, are all the predatory corporate and Wall Street types that want to exploit human suffering for mega profits because they have the seriously ill held as hapless hostages.
If the Republicans can have their way, they would have all Americans believe that ‘Universal Health Care’ that works so well in other capitalistic countries, particularly Germany, Canada and Britain, the three top ranked countries ahead of the U.S. in the Graph below (compiled mainly by U.S. sources) is something communistic in America.
Other developed countries that match the United States in quality of life - economic, political and cultural - do very well with Universal Health Care, covering almost all their citizens at almost half the cost (an impossible pipe dream in America), making the U.S. and its torturous exploitive system seem politically and commercially corrupt, highly inefficient, and quite heartless.
Health care in the U.S. is a bone of contention for the political ideologues to fight over, rather than a right of the citizens of the country (unlike the bailout of ‘too big to fail’ corporations and bonuses to failing CEOs which were a Capitalistic Right, giving capitalism a bad name, worldwide).
In this America, the slightly improved system under President Obama is being now dismantled by the incredulously callus and inept President Trump, and his gleefully destructive, conveniently adopted, Republican Party, with a proposed plan that is so bad that even - put-your-name-on-everything-TRUMP - wants to own it, so it is being variously called ‘TrumpCare’, for President Trump that calls it ‘wonderful’, or ‘RyanCare’ for the Republican Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, who seems to be the main driver behind it; at this moment it seems to be the ‘NoOneCare’ Plan.
As the ongoing political drama plays out in the coming weeks and/or months, with all the inflamed rhetoric on both sides of the political spectrum, one thing is guaranteed, the American citizens, especially the majority, will suffer a worse health care situation under the Republicans, who are bought and sold by big business and big pharma, while they profess service to struggling Americans and middle America.
Their host of actions since coming into power, and their recent pathetic excuse for an alternative to ObamaCare, in spite of having years to come up with something far more constructive, doesn’t show any ‘Care’ at all, and neither will it, if they can help it.