Our healthcare system is in crisis. Year after year the cost of healthcare rises at a multiple of the inflation rate. Every year fewer businesses provide healthcare for employees. Every year the number of Americans who have healthcare coverage has declined. Because of this, more and more people find themselves without health insurance, without access to preventative care, and without access to any healthcare at all save the emergency room.
These emergency rooms visits are often for illnesses that need never have become so severe, and for illnesses that would regularly be treated by a primary care physician much less expensively. This also puts added pressure on the ability of emergency rooms to properly care for patients, not only because they end up being a place of last resort for those without funds to pay for services (and often end up stuck with the bill), but also because the added numbers of those without insurance or other healthcare options often fill emergency rooms to capacity, making them unavailable for other critical emergency services.
It has become conventional wisdom that patients in emergency rooms and hospitals need a relative or friend that can stay with them in order to advocate on their behalf as they negotiate chaotically overcrowded emergency rooms and understaffed hospitals. “Hundreds of thousands of people die each year from medical errors, and millions are injured by poor quality care and accidents that shouldn’t be happening,” says Patricia Schoeni, Executive Director of National Coalition on healthcare. Schoeni notes that the three main drivers in our current healthcare crisis are cost, coverage, and quality of care—and that all must be addressed as we form healthcare solutions.
We don’t need to read statistics about how poorly our medical system compares to other industrialized countries. It’s a reality we all understand. “We do more research than any other country, the problem is we don’t have the ability or facilities to put what we know how to do best into actual practice on a broad scale,” Schoeni explains. In other words, while we have some of the best healthcare technology in the world, very few people get access to those services.
The crisis of our medical system not only brings the loss of a secure medical safety net for American citizens, the cost of this failing system is also undermining our economy. As car manufacturers and other large companies make decisions about where to locate their manufacturing centers, the U.S. will continue to lose when competing with lower associated healthcare costs. Businesses in the U.S. are fundamentally at a competitive disadvantage in the global economy because of the cost of healthcare.
Our economy is suffering in yet another respect due to the exorbitant cost of healthcare. The fact that medical costs have become a primary cause of bankruptcy is really only the canary in the coal mine. American families have less disposable income and more debt due to the skyrocketing costs of medical care. This depresses the overall economy just like high oil prices do when the high cost of gasoline eats up a family’s budget.
The costs of medical benefits are also distorting the way businesses structure the workplace. Why do you think businesses are willing to pay overtime rather than hire additional workers, even though overworked employees are more likely to make mistakes and be less productive? The costs of benefits have become so burdensome that many employers bend over backwards to avoid hiring additional full-time workers. Some employers “specialize” in hiring part-time workers to avoid paying benefits altogether. One consequence of this trend is that a substantial portion of the working poor have two or three part-time jobs, none with benefits. These hardworking people are just an illness away from financial ruin. Many employers are also having financial difficulty with high premiums and are passing along the increased costs to their employees, making healthcare benefits one of the main issues of contention when unions strike. The fact is that employers and employees are both experiencing huge difficulty due to our healthcare crisis. This situation has to change.