The reality is that the US is far and away the world's biggest healthcare spender both on a share-of-GDP and on a per-capita basis. According to the Commonwealth Fund, based upon Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data, the US spends the most on health care among the top 13 high-income nations of the world: Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and yet its health outcomes, for example life expectancy and infant mortality rates, are worse.
In 2013, the OECD data shows (see chart) that the US spent 17.1% of Gross Domestic Product, which is a measure of all economic activity in the country, on health care. That was 47% higher, or nearly double the 11.6%, spent by the next biggest spender on health care: France, which has a medicare-for-all style system. It's 60% higher than the percentage of GDP spent on health care in neighboring Canada, which has a system of universal insurance actually called Medicare. and it is nearly double the cost of the British National Health System which, more like the US Veterans Administration system, actually employs its medical workers and owns the hospitals, and devotes a paltry 8.8% of GDP to health care costs.
As for per-capita health spending, the situation is even more dramatic. Including public health spending by states, local governments and the national government, employer spending, and spending by individuals and families, the per-capital annual spending on health care in the US in 2013 according to the OECD was $9,086. The next highest country was Switzerland (ironically the only other of these countries that relies on private insurers to cover most of its citizens, though with stipulations mandating no profits on basic plans, which all health insurers must have on offer), at $6,325 per person -- just two-thirds of what Americans spend. In France, the figure was $4,361 and Canada $4,569. Both those figures ae less than half the US per-capita health expenditure (see table for the rest).
In the case of Social Security, the US is again at the bottom among OECD countries in terms of the benefits it pays to its retired citizens and its disabled. In most modern countries, social-security systems, generally government run like US Social Security, replace about 60 percent of a working person's income when they retire, which, since they generally no longer have children to support, have free or almost free medical care, and by then own their own home or live in affordable apartments, is enough to allow them to retire without taking a hit in their standard of living. In the US, where Social Security was founded as, it's benefits have never moved beyond being just an "underpinning" source of income for the disabled and the poor. Providing an amount that on average replaces just 40% of a working person't income, American Social Security is a program, in other words, not meant to fund a decent retirement, but rather just to keep the elderly and infirm from ending up living in cardboard boxes on heating grates.
A movement to change all that, organized now during the current election year when one leading candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, is calling for the same goals, could really take off, and by remaining independent of the Sanders campaign, could help push the issue forward and build support through the year and, were Sanders to win, into a key spot on his first-term agenda. It would also be a bulwark against inevitable attacks on both critical programs should Republicans somehow manage to win the White House and both houses of Congress.
The first primaries are just weeks off. There is not a moment to waste. All progressive movements, along with the labor movement, must come together urgently to kick off a mass movement of all races, young and old, workers and the unemployed, citizens, immigrants and the undocumented, to fight for these programs -- not just to preserve and protect them, but to bring them into the 21st Century as an implementation of the right of all in this nation to a secure old age and to quality health care.
DAVE LINDORFF is a member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the independent, uncompromised, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, JESS GUH, GARY LINDORFF, ALFREDO LOPEZ, LINN WASHINGTON, JR. and the late CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net
(Article changed on January 15, 2016 at 09:56)
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