“Americans pay twice as much as Europeans for the exact same medicines”
Stephanie Woolhandler
The United States needs universal health care. It’s an issue of human rights and public health. We had 30 million people uninsured before the COVID pandemic and some 7 to 13 million Americans have since lost their health insurance. Many rely on employers for their health insurance, and the pandemic has caused widespread unemployment.
Our biggest mistake in the U.S. has been to organize medical care along market lines. Other nations have chosen to organize health care like a public service, which is both more equal and more efficient. Per capita health-care costs in the U.S. are twice as high as in most of Europe and other developed countries. Administrative costs in the U.S. account for 34 percent of all health-care spending, in a complex system with thousands of different health-insurance plans, each with its own rules. In Canada, which has national health insurance, administration is just 17 percent of total health-care costs. Our privatized healthcare financing system costs the U.S. $600 billion (€493 billion) in excess administrative costs each year compared to Canada.
Over-provision of some services and of high-tech equipment for well-insured, affluent Americans is also a problem. And then there is the excessive cost of drugs. Americans pay twice as much as Canadians or Europeans for the exact same medicines. The profits of U.S. drug companies over the past couple of decades have been three times as high as the Fortune 500 average. Policymakers in the U.S. seem to believe that corporations have a right to make unlimited profits from the treatment of sick people. That’s why we need the government to step in and regulate drug prices.
The insurance companies and big pharmaceuticals will strongly oppose reforms that limit their profitmaking. They have devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to lobbying and political advertising to oppose Medicare for All. The political problem isn’t lack of public support for universal health insurance, but the fact that America’s democracy allows giant corporations to have an outsized influence on legislators and other politicians. And that’s what we have to fight against.