Health Care Excuses

[pickledpepperRN]

Health Care Excuses

The United States spends far more on health care per person than any other nation. Yet we have lower life expectancy than most other rich countries. Furthermore, every other advanced country provides all its citizens with health insurance; only in America is a large fraction of the population uninsured or underinsured....

...I thought it would be useful to offer a catalog of the most commonly heard apologies for American health care, and the reasons they won't wash....

...We're told, for example, that there really aren't that many uninsured American citizens, because some of the uninsured are illegal immigrants, while some of the rest are actually entitled to Medicaid. This misses the point that the 47 million people in this country without insurance are an ever-changing group, so that the experience of being without insurance extends to a much broader group-in fact, more than one in every three people in America under the age of 65 was uninsured at some point in 2006 or 2007.

Oh, and finding out that you're covered by Medicaid when you show up at an emergency room isn't at all the same thing as receiving regular medical care....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/09/opinion/09krugman.html?hp

[HM2VikingRN, RN]

Paul Krugman skewers the argument against universal care with this op-ed.