Why Do We Spend So Much Money on Health Care?

AUSTIN, Texas - Sept. 23, 2021 - PRLog -- As Covid vaccination programs across the country push forward to inoculate ever higher numbers of the American public, now is a good time to reflect on the current state of our health care system and consider what we could do to make it more effective and efficient.

That's what makes a new academic work, Health Insurance Systems: An International Comparison, researched and written by Thomas Rice, a distinguished professor of health policy and management at UCLA's Fielding School of Public Health, such a timely and important resource.

Rice has conducted a thorough investigation of the costs and health outcomes of ten nations, including the United States, making it easier to make direct comparisons between countries and to identify the best practices in public health policy and finance.

Having Survived Three Supreme Court Challenges, The Affordable Care Act Is Now More Popular Than Ever

We'll look in detail at Rice's findings shortly. But it's also worth mentioning at this point that the current US health care system we have today appears to be with us in its current form at least through the remainder of the current Biden administration.

That's thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision not to invalidate the Affordable Care Act (or ACA, for short and often colloquially known as 'Obamacare'), making this the third and likely final attempt in recent years to overthrow the law in court for the foreseeable future.

Pollsters have found that the ACA has also become more popular over time, with an increasing percentage of Americans approving the law, including the Medicaid expansion portion. Public opinion values a couple of key provisions of the law, including keeping young adults up to the age of 26 on their parent's insurance plans, the exclusion of discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, and the elimination of time or financial limits on treatment coverage.

But the new law has many of us asking, does it make health care insurance truly affordable? The premiums, even with Federal subsidies, are not cheap. And coverage is not available for impoverished residents of states that elected not to extend Medicaid coverage to their low-income populations.

On the other hand, the ACA did expand health care coverage for tens of millions who previously had no health care insurance, and its importance has grown as millions more were laid off during the height of the Covid pandemic lockdown.

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