From Kaiser Health News
"Despite spending more than twice as much as other developed countries, the United States still lags behind in terms of access and quality, an international survey said Wednesday," Agence France-Presse reports. The Health Affairs study, which was based on survey responses from thousands of primary care physicians, also found that people in the United States were more likely to struggle to gain access to or pay for treatment than patients in 10 other countries evaluated because of insurance restrictions and high health care costs. "The United States is the only industrialized democracy that does not ensure that all of its citizens have health care coverage, with an estimated 36 million Americans uninsured," the French news agency reports (11/5).
The Seattle Post Intelligencer's travel writer shares the views of some residents of other developed countries on their native health systems. A person from Sweden – one of the countries covered in the Health Affairs survey – says, "The health and medical services have an obligation to strengthen the situation of the patient, for example, by providing individually tailored information, freedom to choose between treatment options, and the right to a second opinion in cases of life-threatening or other particularly serious diseases or injuries. Having lived here all my life and raised my family here in Stockholm, I honestly do not see anything bad with our health care system" (Steves, 11/4).
The Congressional Budget Office may be missing potential savings from various health reform proposals by not looking at efforts to manage or prevent expensive, chronic conditions such as diabetes and heart disease, researchers said in a study released on Tuesday. The nonpartisan CBO, charged by Congress to estimate the cost of various programs, now uses a 10-year forecast that cannot look at the cost of programs aimed at diseases that can last for decades, researchers at the University of Chicago said.
Instead, the CBO should use methods that would weigh savings from earlier treatment and other intervention that could help reduce costly complications from conditions that arise when left untreated or improperly treated, they said.
Lawmakers need cost estimates that look at a period of 25 years for healthcare legislation, they said in their study, which was sponsored by diabetes drug maker Novo Nordisk A/S and looked at a scientific model to help estimate such costs for long-term diseases.
"Although this would not be necessary for the vast majority of cost estimates produced by the CBO, it would improve the information available when Congress considers health legislation with implications for the treatment of a relatively small number of costly chronic illnesses," they wrote. Read it all at Reuters
In the United States, if you are sick and earn a modest income, then you are probably underinsured - even if you have employer-based health coverage. In 2007, among people at 200 percent of poverty ($41,300 for a family of four in 2007) who were among the top 25 percent of spenders on health care services, 71 percent were underinsured.
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