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Nurses hold a protest with the Registered Nurses Union, SEIU Local 121RN, in front of West Hills Hospital on June 18, 2020 in West Hills, California. (Photo: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)
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When I was developing into Rust Belt, there was an expression that other people used to describe an unusually vicious or cold-blooded child in the community (and there were some). “He would kill you rather than look at you,” they said.
Our healthcare formula is the ultimate direct killer of all. It is designed to be separate from human suffering, life and death.
I even got an idea of this word when a graphic recently circulated on left-wing social media comparing life expectancy and physical care prices in the United States to those in other industrialized countries. It went viral, even though the data it contained has been the subject of much discussion for years. This is the strength of a well-designed image.
Why are our prices so much higher and our health care outcomes so much worse?There are many reasons, but the maxim is: our fitness financing formula is sociopathic. This is not hyperbole. Ours is a formula that would literally “kill you as fast as you look. “
I discovered a graph on life expectancy in the United States produced by Max Roser, who runs an online page called Our World in Data (ourworldindata. org).
About this chart:
This comes with the disabilities, lost productivity, economic stagnation, and poor quality of life created through our inferior healthcare system.
It breaks down the large disparities in health care outcomes in the U. S. U. S. by race or class.
It ends in 2018, so it doesn’t come with over a million people who have died so far from Covid-19 in this country, let’s leave those who have died elsewhere.
It also doesn’t come with the billions of dollars the government directed at personal pharmaceutical corporations and other suppliers during the pandemic, only to have them overcharge us for the products they then developed at the expense of the state.
And remember: when we communicate about longevity, we’re not just communicating about other people who lose the last years of their lives. . . it’s quite tragic. But infant and child mortality also narrows the curve, as do premature deaths at all ages.
racial disparities
In the decades covered by this graph, infant mortality rates for blacks were 2. 5 times higher than those for whites. Race has been a long-standing predictor of fitness outcomes. These statistics, which I prepared for Bernie Sanders before a speech in Baltimore in 2016, are too representative of the black American experience:
If you were born in Baltimore’s poorest neighborhood, your life expectancy is 20 years shorter than if you were born in the richest neighborhood.
15 Baltimore’s neighborhoods have a lower life expectancy than North Korea. Two of them have higher infant mortality than the Palestinian West Bank.
According to a 2015 report through the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore teens ages 15 to 19 face worse physical conditions and poorer economic clients than those in economically troubled cities in Nigeria, India, China and South Africa.
Here’s another statistic: Black youth are seven to ten times more likely to die from asthma than white youth. This is the one I take personally, as I almost died of asthma as a kid (even though I’m white) and it’s a horrible way of doing things.
You may just gather more facts and figures, but you already get the idea. The racialized nature of the U. S. health care formulaThe U. S. Government, which is instrumentalized through economic discrimination, harms and kills. That’s why, since the advent of Covid-19, age-adjusted statistics show that African Americans have been especially affected, with death rates 67% higher than those of whites and about 2. 2 times higher than those of the organization with the lowest adjusted mortality rates (Asian-Americans).
dead class
White America is catching up, at least in its poorest neighborhoods. “Deaths from despair” (suicide, opioid addiction, and alcoholism) were wreaking havoc on low-income white American men even before the pandemic, contributing to the decline in expectation in the United States (as shown in the graph above).
An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) showed that living in a region of high economic inequality was, like race, a strong predictor of covid deaths. In 2020, nearly another 46,000 people in the United States committed suicide. White men, who make up 30 percent of the population, committed 70 percent of suicides.
Elegance is a killer.
Indifferent to suffering
Our health care formula is the ultimate direct killer of all. It is designed to be separate from human suffering, life and death. For this formula, it doesn’t matter if a user lives or dies while being paid. That’s why our fitnesscare prices are very high, even if our life expectancy is very short.
Health care providers and medical facilities are paid for the facilities they provide, whether you live or die. The more facilities they provide, the more money they make. Health insurers operate with an even more perverse set of incentives. Their rates are based on the total volume of expected installations, which then increase. Their business practices are designed to move as much charge as possible to the patient, while restricting the patient’s freedom. of choice. They drive patients to providers who settle for the insurance company’s low rates and conform to its restrictive regulations on health care.
This formula is designed to be expensive. Let’s say you pay for a plan with a $5,000 deductible. As Sarah Kliff and Josh Katz documented for the New York Times, a colonoscopy at the University of Mississippi Medical Center will charge you $1,463 with a Cigna plan and $2,144 with an Aetna plan. If, on the other hand, you do not have insurance, this colonoscopy will charge you “only” $ 782.
Kliff also reported the case of a couple whose bathroom died in the hospital. Although insured through Cigna, the couple won a $257,000 bill in what they described as “a dispute between a giant hospital and a giant insurer, with the patient caught in the middle. ” This formula is separate from the trauma it inflicts on patients or their survivors.
These are the incentives
The effects are also a matter of indifference. People are charged, no matter what. One found that the average charge for treating fatal injuries in the U. S. UU. es $6,880 if the patient dies in the emergency room and $41,570 if he or she dies in the hospital.
Some historians claim that ancient court doctors in Asia were paid for the month their patients remained fit. This may or may not be a myth. What is not in fact a myth is that, in many publicly funded fitness systems around the world, fitness professionals are paid through salary and not volume, while hospitals are given a constant (or “global”) budget to provide care. This creates less incentive to “bring down” patients and more incentive to focus on patient care.
That’s the kind of formula we deserve to have. Instead, we have a formula where they charge $2,144 for a colonoscopy and $41,570 for a failed treatment. It’s a formula where you would be killed rather than looked at. Never mind. They make cash anyway.
Richard Eskow
Richard (RJ) Eskow is a freelance writer. Much of his paintings may be in eskow. substack. com. His weekly show, The Zero Hour, can be on cable TV, radio, Spotify and podcasts. He is a senior advisor to Social Security Works.
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