The Star ran this story yesterday:
KC explores extending a health care tax despite Obamacare
Obamacare’s promise of health care for the poor and uninsured may not be enough to relieve Kansas City taxpayers of their own health care bill.
Today a Kansas City Council committee is set to recommend an April vote on renewing part of a tax that now subsidizes health care for the indigent.
If voters say yes, a property tax described as “temporary” would yield at least $150 million — through 2023 — for Truman Medical Center, ambulance service and several neighborhood health centers. All provide free or low-cost services to the area’s poorest residents. I've written about this here before. It's just maddening that we have--bar none--the most expensive health care system in the world yet out population ranks far behind many, many other nations when it comes to overall health, quality of life and overall life spans.
So, with this article, locally, I just, coincidentally ran across this yesterday, too, from NPR:
US Ranks Below 16 Other Rich Countries In Health Report
It's no news that the U.S. has lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than most high-income countries. But a magisterial new report says Americans are actually less healthy across their entire life spans than citizens of 16 other wealthy nations.
And the gap is steadily widening.
"What struck us — and it was quite sobering — was the recurring trend in which the U.S. seems to be slipping behind other high-income countries," the lead author of the report, Dr. Steven Woolf, tells Shots.
He says Americans of all ages up to 75 have shorter lives and more illness and injury. (An interactive graphic displaying the main results can be found here.)
Strikingly, even Americans who are white, insured, college-educated and upper-income are worse off than their counterparts around the world — a finding that no one quite understands.
"People with seemingly everything going for them still live shorter lives and have higher disease rates than people in other countries," Woolf says.
The 378-page report was completed under the auspices of the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences. It grew out of an effort last year that concluded the U.S. has a large and widening "mortality gap" among adults over 50 compared with other high-income nations.
It's nearly insane. We shouldn't put up with this. We shouldn't tolerate this of ourselves in this nation. It's obscene.
Our health care system is not only broken, it's grossly immoral.
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2 comments:
I'd say our food supply and environment have something to do with that, in addition to our ridiculous health care system.
Agreed. It's not just one factor.
These systems just don't work for us.
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