Health care in the United States

"Physicians’ and pharmacists’ first and foremost ethical obligation in situations of epidemic , disaster or terrorism is to provide urgent medical care and ensure availability and appropriate use of necessary medications. This requires close coordination with the entire health care team to help ensure patients receive the testing, treatments, follow-up care and medications they need. We applaud the innumerable selfless acts by health care professionals across the nation who are putting themselves in harm’s way to provide care to America’s patients."

"Homer Simpson: America's health care system is second only to Japan … Canada, Sweden, Great Britain … well, all of Europe. But you can thank your lucky stars we don't live in Paraguay!"

"It doesn’t say rest on your laurels, but to keep on pushing. In this work, sometimes you get heavy criticism. People do say ugly things, ‘You just want money.’ I just want other people to have health care. You know, Jesus healed everybody and never charged a co-pay."

"With its broad sweep, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us into an unprecedented national emergency. This emergency, however, results from a deeper and much longer term crisis — that of poverty and inequality, and of a society that ignores the needs of 140 million people who are poor or a $400 emergency away from being poor. [...] We cannot return to normal. Addressing the depth of the crises that have been revealed in this pandemic means enacting universal health care. [...] Before COVID-19, nearly 700 people died everyday because of poverty and inequality in this country. The frontlines of this pandemic will be the poor and dispossessed - those who do not have access to healthcare [...] - and those who are continuing to work in this crisis, meeting our health care and other needs. It should not have taken a pandemic to raise these resources."

"In June 2019, we presented a Poor People’s Moral Budget to the House Budget Committee, showing that we can meet these needs for this entire country. If you had taken up this Moral Budget, we would have already moved towards infusing more than $1.2 trillion into the economy to invest in health care, good jobs, living wages, housing, water and sanitation services and more. This is not the time for trickle-down solutions. We know that when you lift from the bottom, everybody rises. There are concrete solutions to this immediate crisis and the longer term illnesses we have been battling for months, years and decades before. We will continue to organize and build power until you meet these demands. Many millions of us have been hurting for far too long. We will not be silent anymore."

"While the virus itself does not discriminate, it is the poor and disenfranchised who will experience the most suffering and death. They’re the ones who are least likely to have health care. [...] We need health care to be understood as a human right for all of us."

"Now I know what you're saying. You're saying, "Dave, you have painted a distorted and inaccurate picture of the American health-care system. Not all patients wind up being as wretched as Mary! Many of them wind up being dead." True, but let's not get nitpicky. The point is, our health-care system is a terrible mess. It's expensive, wasteful, inefficient, unresponsive, and infested with lawyers. Which is why there has been a big push, in some quarters, to place it under the management of... The federal government. This is like saying if your local police department has a corruption problem, the solution is to turn law enforcement over to the Sopranos. Nevertheless, there are people- intelligent, educated, well-meaning people- who seriously believe that we should let Washington redesign our health-care system. It goes without saying that these people live and work in Washington; that's the only place where you're going to find intelligent, educated, well-meaning people who are that stupid."

"The rest of the country is not so thrilled about trusting their health care to the same government that produced, for example, the U.S. Tax Code. Most Americans outside of Washington don't really trust Washington to do anything except screw up. This is the fundamental reason we have a two-party system. We put the Republicans in office until they have totally screwed things up, then we vote them out and let the Democrats take their turn totally screwing everything up, then we switch back to the Republicans, and so on, back and forth. It's like a Ping-Pong game in which neither player ever actually makes contact with the ball. So to summarize the health-care crisis: Our current system for providing medical care is insane. But a majority of Americans understand that the federal government, if given the opportunity, would figure out a way to make it worse. Therefore, the odds are that nothing will be done. So your best bet, until further notice, is to do what 83 percent of all licensed American physicians do, according to a recent survey: Avoid medical care altogether. This means you need to stay healthy. Exercise regularly, get plenty of rest, avoid contact with humans, and never inhale or open your eyes in a public restroom. Above all, make sure you at a balanced diet. By which I mean: broccoli and alcohol."

"It has been a rotting corpse for decades, with heinous medical experiments carried out throughout our modern history. The administration of LSD to prepubescent children by the intelligence services in the 1950s; the widespread use of psychiatric drugs, lobotomies, electric shock, and involuntary commitments in the decades after; and the deliberate butchery of over 60 million infants in America since 1971. We are only now paying a bill that was racked up over several generations. We tolerated medical injustice because most of us did not know any better. More of us know more now, but the truth is withheld from the masses under the COVID-19 censorship regime."

"We believe that the healthcare system is a uniquely American calamity that is undermining American lives."

"When Susan Finley developed flu-like symptoms, she didn’t go to the doctor because she was frightened about the cost. Finley’s grandparents later found her dead in her apartment. She was 53. Finley did not die as a result of Covid-19. She died in 2016 as a result of America’s healthcare system – a system that led her to avoid treatment for the common flu in order to avoid debt. It is that same system that is currently creaking under the pressure of a pandemic that experts warned was coming but governments failed to prepare for."

"It [America’s healthcare system] is a system that does not qualify for the term “developed”. [...] There are 2.9 hospital beds for every 1,000 people in the United States. That’s fewer than Turkmenistan (7.4 beds per 1,000), Mongolia (7.0), Argentina (5.0) and Libya (3.7). In fact, the US ranks 69th out of 182 countries analyzed by the World Health Organization. This lack of hospital beds is forcing doctors across the country to ration care under Covid-19, pushing up the number of preventable deaths. America’s numbers are similarly unimpressive when it comes to medical doctors. The United States has 2.6 doctors per 1,000 people, placing it behind Trinidad & Tobago (2.7), and Russia (4.0 doctors per 1,000, for a country that is described as being “in transition”). Life expectancies at birth are lower in the US than they are in Chile or China. The US has a higher maternal mortality rate than Iran or Saudi Arabia."

"The facts are as exhaustive as they are exhausting. There’s one simple conclusion from all of this. We’ve been tricked. We’ve been told that America, like most other majority-white countries, deserves the title “developed economy”. It does not. You cannot charge a woman $39.95 to hold the baby that she has just given birth to. You cannot constantly operate hospitals at close to capacity in order to maximize profits. The pursuit of in systems built for public good has not worked ethically or practically."

"I don't think I know enough to say, well, here's the plan. It's not my specialty.... But I don't think there's any way not to have that debate about how much we're going to spend on health care.... In finding our way forward, we've got to be able to find ways to deliver the quality care that everyone expects and that we're capable of providing to the maximum number of people."

"The U.S.'s privatized for-profit health care system had long been an international scandal, with twice the per capita expenses of other developed societies and some of the worst outcomes. Neoliberal doctrine struck another blow, introducing business measures of efficiency: just-on-time service with no fat in the system. Any disruption and the system collapses. This is the world that Trump inherited, the target of his battering ram."

"If Americans are to have the courage to change in a difficult time, we must first be secure in our most basic needs. Tonight I want to talk to you about the most critical thing we can do to build that security. This health care system of ours is badly broken, and it is time to fix it. Despite the dedication of literally millions of talented health care professionals, our health care is too uncertain and too expensive, too bureaucratic and too wasteful. It has too much fraud and too much greed."

"Those naysayers who say free, high quality, and comprehensive health care is too expensive under socialism have not evaluated the cost savings – to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year – that will come from eliminating the corporate class."

"The attacks on gender freedom from the right are not only united in their ideology, but increasingly in their rhetoric. Abortion and trans rights activists have long insisted that both abortion and transition are healthcare. It’s an apt and worthy argument, considering that both involve the interventions of medical professionals, both facilitate the wellbeing and happiness of those who receive them, and both result in horrific health complications when denied, from the high rates of mental distress and horrific, needless pregnancy complications that have been ushered in by Dobbs, to the dramatic rates of suicidal ideation and mental health problems in trans people who are denied the ability to transition. But increasingly, the right has begun to attack the notion of abortion and trans rights as healthcare, arguing that neither pregnancy nor non-transition constitute “illness.”"

"But while these practices of abortion and transition care constitute medicine and while their outcomes encourage health, it would be a mistake to fight the political battle for these services only on the ground of what counts as “healthcare.” Because the truth is that conservatives do not care about health – they don’t care about the integrity of the medical profession, or about patient outcomes, or about bodies, not really. They care about people, and about making sure that those people stay in line. In the grand tradition of feminists and queers alike, we should refuse to."

"In the wake of slavery’s end, skilled Black midwives represented both real competition for white men who sought to enter the practice of child delivery, and a threat to how obstetricians viewed themselves. Male gynecologists claimed midwifery was a degrading means of obstetrical care. They viewed themselves as elite members of a trained profession with tools such as forceps and other technologies, and the modern convenience of hospitals, which excluded Black and Indigenous women from practice within their institutions."

"To better understand racial injustice in the anti-abortion movement, remember that American hospitals barred the admission of African Americans both in terms of practice and as patients."

"Communities marginalized by racial discrimination and oppression also face barriers in accessing healthcare, which severely and negatively impacts these communities. Indigenous Americans experience statistically worse healthcare outcomes than other populations in the US and already had difficulty accessing abortion long before Dobbs. The same is true for Black Americans, who have always faced high barriers to accessing healthcare. Hence, individuals who belong to more than one marginalized group, such as rural Black Americans, face especially high barriers. Access to abortion — and indeed to quality healthcare — has never been equitable for persons from marginalized communities in the US. Dobbs exacerbates many of these inequities by, for example, requiring individuals to travel farther for care and often out of state. Women of color are more likely to fall below the poverty line than white women and therefore feel the costs of interstate travel for healthcare particularly acutely. They are also less likely to have paid time off or paid sick leave to allow for travel, and face additional discrimination to obtain necessary healthcare."

"Migrants and asylum seekers face further barriers in accessing reproductive healthcare. Irregular immigration status prevents millions of individuals from qualifying for health insurance programs in general, and creates particular barriers to accessing insurance that covers reproductive healthcare services. Immigrants also face mobility restrictions. Many US states require documentation of immigration status in order to receive a driver's license, and some of the most restrictive bans on abortion are in states (such as Texas) that host a network of Border Patrol checkpoints. Undocumented immigrants who seek to cross state lines to access abortion care are at risk of arrest, detention, and deportation. As Dr. Serapio explained, for individuals who are undocumented and/or unauthorized, or who have undocumented and/or unauthorized family members, travel out of state is therefore not an option due to the possible legal ramifications, even where resources are available. Youth with migrant status or with families that have mixed migration or documentation statuses face particular barriers in states where parental consent is required for abortion. For example, immigrant youth may lack access to a qualifying parent living in the country; immigrant parents may not be able to provide legally valid consent if they lack documentation of their legal status; and younger people with migrant status may be deterred from seeking healthcare or involving a parent by a general fear of immigration consequences for themselves or their families In these cases, immigrant youth may be forced to seek a judicial bypass or remain pregnant involuntarily."

"In general, the states enacting bans have some of the worst healthcare systems in the country and have historically dedicated few resources for low-income residents. Lawmakers passing abortion bans have for years refused to address these problems."

"It has largely skipped the national press’s attention — perhaps because of the presidential debate that evening — but a June 27 court ruling could have far-reaching negative consequences for U.S. health care and federalism. If [the] higher courts uphold it, the ruling will not only make conservative changes to state Medicaid programs difficult to impossible, but it could also permanently lock states into Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion to the able-bodied. …States like Georgia and Mississippi that spent the past year considering Medicaid expansion should view Boasberg’s ruling as a timely warning of the fiscal and legal perils awaiting should they acquiesce. The combination of much less flexibility for states regarding benefit packages, coupled with a potential inability to exit the Obamacare expansion, could turn Medicaid into a fiscal version of the Eagles’ “Hotel California” — states can check out any time they like, but they can never leave."

"We therefore urge the Democratic Party to adopt the principle that America has a responsibility to offer every American family the best in health care, whenever they need it, regardless of income or any other factor. We must devise a system which will assure that every American receives comprehensive health services from the day he is born until the day he dies, with an emphasis on preventive care to keep him healthy."

"Congress has the authority under the Constitution to exempt individuals from any requirement that they perform medical procedures that are objectionable to their religious convictions. Indeed, in many cases, the Constitution itself is sufficient to grant an exemption to protect persons from official acts that infringe on their free exercise of religion."

"Sarah Kliff spent the last year looking at over 1000 ER bills and has found outrageous facility fees, high costs for OTC drugs, and charges for simply sitting in the waiting room. Medicare for All would take these excess costs out of the equation..."

"Our demand for Medicare for All must be stronger than Big Pharma lobbyists."

"Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in healthcare is the most shocking and inhumane."

"Un pre-ACA days, a bout with a virus might not have been considered a preexisting condition. That's because many people tend to recover quickly from viruses. But in a blog post last week, researchers at the Rand Corp. suggested that COVID-19 could be seen differently by insurers. "Given the chronic problems [which can include organ damage, fatigue and confusion] associated with some COVID-19 cases, it is possible that some insurers would place restrictions on anyone who had a confirmed case of COVID-19," wrote Carter C. Price, Rand's senior mathematician, and Raffaele Vardavas, a mathematician at Rand who specializes in infectious disease models."

"Twenty years ago, Kaiser surveyed health insurance underwriters and asked about a similar situation: a hypothetical applicant in perfect health except for "situational depression" following the death of a spouse. According to the survey, "in 60 applications for coverage, this applicant was denied a quarter of the time, and offered coverage with a surcharged premium and/or benefit exclusions 60% of the time." So both experts and consumers are concerned that invalidating the Affordable Care Act could mean that once again, individuals with preexisting conditions might not be covered — and such conditions could include COVID-19."

"Modern observers accustomed to thinking of the medical profession as prestigious technically effective and highly paid are sometimes shocked to learn that it was none of those things in the nineteenth century. On the contrary, much of its history during that century was an uphill struggle to attain jut those attributes. Whereas European physicians entered the modern era with at least the legacy of well-defined guild structure-structures that took responsibility for teaching, maintained the right to determine who could practice, and exercised some control over the conduct an craft of the profession-American physicians did not. Because of its history as a colony, the United States attracted few guild-trained physicians, and consequently a formal guild structure never developed. Healing in this country started out primarily as a domestic rather than a professional skill (women and slaves often developed considerable local reputations as healers), and therefore anyone who claimed medical talent could practice-and for the most part could practice outside of any institutional controls of the sort that existed in Europe. It is true that some early colonies did establish different fee structures for “trained” as opposed to “folk” doctors, but these regulations were not supported by “enabling” legislation. “Trained” physicians had the right to charge more, but there were no regulatory mechanisms by which they could enforce their higher fees or, ore importantly, deny others the right to practice medicine. From the earliest days of the medical profession in this country, therefore, physicians wanted effective licensing laws that would do for them what the guild structures had done for their European colleagues, namely, restrict the competition."

"In the early part of the nineteenth century, the fate of trained physicians became even worse. What few regulations had existed in the colonial period were swept away in the era of Jacksonian democracy, and medical practice became one vast free market. Moreover, during the second quarter of the century, deep doctrinal divisions appeared within the rank of trained physicians themselves. For the first third of the century, physicians had depended on a model of illness that called upon the use of drastic medical treatments such as bleeding or the administration of harsh laxatives and emetics. By the 1850, a new group of physician (including such luminaries as Oliver Wendell Holmes) rejected the use of this “heroic armamentarium” and earned for themselves the sobriquet of “therapeutic nihilists” inasmuch as they seemed to argue that anything a physician could do was probably ineffective and might be dangerous as well. Two other developments during the course of the century kept the social and professional status of medicine low. First, as the effectiveness of “heroic” medicine was called into question by some physicians themselves, there was a proliferation of healers who advocated new models of treatment. Thomosonians, botanics, and homeopath among others all developed “sets” of healing and claimed the title of doctor for themselves. These nineteenth-century sectarians flourished, perhaps in part because they tended to support relatively mild forms of treatment (bath, natural diets) instead of the “heroic” measures used by many doctors. Thu, regular physicians (those who had some semblance of formal training and who subscribed to the dominant medial model) found themselves in increasing competition with the sectarians, whom they considered quacks."

"Concurrent with the emergence of the sectarian, there was an explosion of new medical schools: an estimated four hundred new ones opened during the course of the century. Unlike modern-day medical schools, whose strict admission standards are legendary, the majority of these schools were proprietary. Like modern-day vocational schools, they were open to all who could pay their fees, and precisely because they depended upon fees to survive, they were reluctant to fail anyone who could be counted on to pay tuition regularly. Members of the regular medical profession were therefore caught in a dilemma. In order to upgrade the profession’s status, they had to upgrade not only the standards of practice but also the education and qualifications of those who wished to practice. However, the prerequisite to such an upgrading-the restriction of the title of “doctor” to only the bet and the best-trained physicians-was difficult to meet because of the lack of licensing laws. Physicians faced the paradox that they could not obtain licensing laws until they were “better” than the competition, but becoming “better” depended on having licensing laws. The way in which physicians solved this problem was to bring them to the center of the abortion debate in America."

"Did you know that of the 14 states with the highest number of painkiller prescriptions per person, they all went for Trump?"

"The head of Indianapolis-based insurance company OneAmerica said the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people. “We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference this week. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.”"

"We are the richest country in the world. We spend more on health care than any other country. Yet we have the worst health care in the Western world. Come on. We can do better than this."

"Sanders is still fighting the battle for single payer, Medicare-like coverage for all, even as fellow Democrats capitulated to the siren songs of the health and insurance industries. President Obama, himself a one-time advocate of single payer coverage, buckled to the insurance companies and its lobbyists and minions in Congress and agreed to health care legislation (the Affordable Care Act) that would continue to treat healing the sick as a profit center instead of a basic human right."

"NIH-sponsored research has resulted in the identification of genetic mutations that cause osteoporosis, Lou Gehrig's Disease, cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease. Effective treatment for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) has been developed and today nearly 80 percent of children diagnosed with ALL are alive and disease-free after 5 years. Because of research, the nature of medicine is changing. We are approaching disease at the cellular level. We are targeting problems earlier, more specifically, less intrusively, with greater success and fewer side effects. Advances in genetics will soon let us intervene in disease before symptoms appear."

"Today, 100 million Americans suffer from serious or currently incurable diseases. Fifty-four million Americans are disabled. Our Government is supposed to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Beyond that, we have a moral responsibility to help others. Time is absolutely critical. If the Government forces scientists' attempt to make adult stem cells behave like embryonic stem cells, they might waste 5 years or more and fail. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands will have died."

"[W]hen I read articles or hear people say that the promise of human embryonic stem cells is dubious, I am very disturbed, because the only reason they get to say that is because the NIH has not been allowed to spend a single dollar on embryonic stem cell research. They have a budget now of $25 billion, and yet, because of lack of guidelines and because of the restrictions that have been imposed on the NIH so far, not one human embryonic stem cell project has been federally funded. That is why you are seeing such slow progress. And if we continue that way, I am going to be in this wheelchair for a long time that I do not need to be, and others like me."

"The budget of the National Institute of Health in 1998 was 12 billion dollars. However, due to Congress and also got pressure applied by a number of disease groups, the budget for fiscal 2003 will be 27.2 billion dollars. And human ... HHS Secretary Thompson has said there is plenty of money available for the kind of research. Doubling the budget of the NIH and more within five years has been an extraordinary accomplishment. So to say that there isn't ... I mean, more money would be nice, but to say there's not enough money to do research into therapeutic cloning is a false statement."

"On the other hand, you have to understand that our allies are not rogue nations. The U.K., Australia, Canada, Singapore, Israel, India, these are just some of the countries that have already passed therapeutic cloning. In fact, England passed it twice. The House of Lords considered it, passed it, the pro-life groups objected to it, they took time to listen to those groups and then they passed it a second time. And therapeutic cloning is allowed with strict government oversight. And to say that those countries are less moral than we are, I think is hubris on our part that's out of control."

"In the early '80s, the public discourse about AIDS was divisive and ugly. Some elected officials said the disease was God's revenge on people who lived a certain lifestyle. The federal government wouldn't fund research for a cure. But, today, the NIH spends $1.8 billion on AIDS research annually, and the virus is no longer an epidemic in this country. So, how did we get from that climate of fear and animosity in the early '80s to where we are today? Well, it's by the extraordinary efforts of ordinary individuals, then change occurred, as it has time and time again throughout our history."

"So if you believe in guaranteed high-quality universal healthcare, because you have seen the cost and the consequence of millions of our fellow Americans who have no healthcare or do not have enough healthcare, then let us come together around a policy that begins by prioritizing affordability in prescription medications that ensures that we bring down the cost of our premiums and our deductibles. And in a country, and in a country where too many of our fellow Americans are dying of diabetes in the year 2019, dying of the flu, dying of curable cancers, in a community, in a state, in a country where one of the largest providers of mental healthcare services is the county jail system, and in a nation that is in the midst of a maternal mortality crisis three times as deadly for women of color, then let us ensure that universal healthcare means all of us can see a primary care provider, all of us can get mental healthcare help, and that universal care means every woman makes her own decisions about her own body. We can give every American, every business in this country the choice to enroll in Medicare without eliminating plans that many Americans like for their families because those plans work for their families. Everyone able to see a doctor. Everyone able to afford their prescription. Everyone able to take their child to a therapist. No one left behind. No one priced out. We must get to universal guaranteed high-quality healthcare as soon as surely as we possibly can."

"The New York State Department of Health appeared to announce this week that non-white New Yorkers would receive priority over whites in receiving “extremely limited” Covid-19 therapies for people at risk."

"D.C. Women's Liberation succeeded for the first time in making informed consent a national issue. In the aftermath of the hearings, the U.S. government would require the pharmaceutical industry to include a patient information sheet with complete information on side effects in every package of birth control pills sold. The growing women's movement was prompting women to assert control over their bodies, and in doing so it changed forever the way Americans take prescription medications."

"Medical literature and newspapers in the late 1700s and early 1800s regularly referred to herbs and medications as abortion-inducing methods, since surgical procedures were rare. Reproductive care including abortion was unregulated in those days; it was provided by skilled midwives, nurses, and other unlicensed women’s health care providers. Midwives were trusted, legitimate medical professionals who provided essential reproductive health care. Prior to the Civil War, white men were not generally involved in the kind of gynecological or obstetric, or OB/GYN, practices we know today. Half of the women who provided reproductive care were Black women, some of whom were enslaved; midwives also included Indigenous and white women, according to an essay by Michele Goodwin, a law professor at the University of California-Irvine."

"Criticism should not be focused on Nazi Germany alone but extend beyond to include physicians in democratic countries, as well. Physicians outside Germany before the war, in the United States in particular were well aware of the evolving racist thrust of the health care system. They chose to remain silent."