Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Healthcare reform debate seems incomplete when viewed through multiple links

Full disclosure: In the past, I have worked doing public relations for hospitals in Michigan, one large, one small.

News coverage of the healthcare reform debate can be fascinating, if you can set aside the human costs of inadequate health care.

A doctor bemoans the fate of medicine as health care becomes a business. Dr. Sandeep Jauhar writes in the New York Times that he became a physician to care for patients, not to be a businessman, but considering costs has become a high priority for doctors.

In the same issue of the Times an editorial suggests that as much as $700 billion per year, or 30 percent of U.S. healthcare spending is wasted.

That amount of waste seems plausible when you consider that the U.S. spends more per capita than any other country, according to World Health Organization (WHO) figures. Question: How is it that we can spend so much per person on health care when so many people are not covered by insurance and so, supposedly, do not access health care? According to this link, that and other assumptions about the uninsured are not necessarily correct. Still, with 15 percent of the population uninsured—almost 50 million individuals—the rate seems too high.

When the debate leaves numbers behind and goes to quality, there seems to be a difference of opinion as well. Does the United States have the best healthcare system in the world as some claim when they oppose healthcare reform? The WHO disagrees. (This information is from a 2000 report available here. The 2008 version also is available. Apparently the reports do not update the quality rankings each year.)

The point is not that conflicting opinions and information exist. The point is, that even with a cursory search of the Internet, and taking into account that the information from different sources isn't likely to be equally reliable, news media coverage of the current healthcare debate could be MUCH better.

More later,
Russ

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