The US healthcare system hurts poor Americans. It’s about to get worse | US healthcare
There is a strange disconnect in the public debate about health in the United States. Millions of Americans may drop health insurance as premiums soar in January following the Trump administration’s decision to end federal subsidies that helped nearly 20 million people get insurance on Obamacare marketplaces.
Earlier this year, Republicans in Congress agreed to cut more than $850 billion from Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income people and the Chip health insurance program for children to offset some tax cuts. Given US budget rules, this cut means an additional $500 billion in funding for Medicare is at risk.
Meanwhile, in some corner of the United States, untroubled by these concerns, rich people are pouring money into startups investigating how to extend life: about $12.5 billion in the last 25 years. According to the Wall Street Journal.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman invested $180 million in Retro Biosciences, which hopes to reprogram senescent cells. Tech billionaires like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Sun Microsystems’ Vinod Khosla have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in NewLimit, which tries to reverse cell aging. A few weeks ago, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg reshaped his philanthropic foundation to focus on the intersection of biology and artificial intelligence to eventually cure all diseases.
A quick look at the health status of Americans will tell you that this mix of priorities is not ideal. America’s life expectancy was shorter in 2023 than it was in 2010. Not only has this fallen far below the life expectancy of people in wealthy countries like the European Union, Japan or Canada. Average life expectancy at birth in the United States is now shorter than in Albania, the Czech Republic, Chile and Panama. That’s four years shorter than the average life expectancy in Puerto Rico.
Despite these Americans large expenditures on healthcareThis system, in a league of its own, is bloated by a large, private, profit-driven medical industry that demands an arm and a leg from patients and their insurers every time they come into contact with the system, regardless of whether the intervention has any benefit to their health.
Like the United States’ disturbingly deep poverty, excess mortality is not due to some technical shortcoming or economic constraints. It is a choice. The United States is not just rich. Better inventing newfangled drugs and treatments probably more than any other country in the world. The scary thing is to ensure that its people, even the poor, have access to the basic building blocks of a healthy life—from decent jobs to ordinary amenities like drinking water to access to social services. health insurance.
American death and poverty are closely linked. Often the nation’s deadliest ailments, from fentanyl addiction to obesity to numerous suicides, do not require advanced healthcare technology. It is the social contract that needs to be fixed.
Americans’ short lives are not breaking news. Relevant scientists have been trying to draw attention to these for years. In 2013, the National Institutes of Health published a major study titled “U.S. Health in International Perspective:” Shorter Life, Poorer Health”, a panel of experts worked to determine the reasons why Americans are dying younger than people in other countries.
The study mostly made suggestions about learning opportunities from other countries. What did Washington do about this? Republicans have been trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act for years. Then there were cuts to Medicaid. And there’s the new vaccine schedule, courtesy of health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.
People who invest in futuristic life extensions are not dying young. Life expectancy inequality It is probably steeper in the US than in any other high-income country. He conducted research 10 years ago The study, conducted by scientists from Harvard, MIT, McKinsey and the US Treasury, found that the richest 1 percent of American men live 14.6 years longer than the poorest 1 percent. For women, this difference was 10.1 years. What’s more, the longevity gap between Americans in the top 5 percent and those in the bottom 5 percent widened for more than two years, from 2001 to 2014.
Among the disorders that kill Americans at higher rates: baby death opioid overdoses, Americans’ disproportionate poverty It plays a critical role in explaining the deficits. Economists’ research Researchers from Brown University, Dartmouth College and the University of Southern California found that babies born to wealthy American mothers died at nearly the same rate as babies born to wealthy European mothers. Nearly all of Americans’ disproportionate infant deaths were caused by poor people’s children.
There’s a long list of reasons why Americans are dying younger: high infant and maternal mortality and disproportionate suicide And murder These rates are not surprising, considering the prevalence of guns in American society. there are these road accidents – probably because Americans drive more – and lung disorders caused by disproportion smoking rates From the 1940s to the 1980s. obesity. And there are what economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case call “deaths of despair”; These days it’s usually in the hands of one person. fentanyl overdose.
But perhaps the most important factor explaining the extremely short lives of the United States is that no one cares about preventing poor, marginalized Americans from dying. Washington is busy giving tax breaks to rich people, so maybe they could invest in stopping cells from aging.
