Painful Truths the U.S. Can Learn from Global Healthcare
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofb9Yhof1dc
Tag: health system
Pregnancy care deserts are growing. Indigenous babies are at risk.
“Many providers like Balay see an obvious link between rising congenital syphilis rates and sparse access to obstetric care (i.e., care for pregnant people, also called maternity or prenatal care). That’s largely because, historically, prenatal care is where syphilis transmission to a fetus has been interrupted. Testing is standard in prenatal care, and all but eight states require syphilis testing during pregnancy.
The problem is simple, as Balay explains. “There just is not enough obstetric care,” she said. And as prenatal care becomes increasingly scarce, so do opportunities to catch and treat syphilis.
Balay is not alone in thinking that scarcity helps explain what’s happening with congenital syphilis, especially among Indigenous Americans.
In a recent CDC report, 37 percent of US babies with syphilis were born to parents who didn’t get timely syphilis testing during pregnancy. But that number was higher, 47 percent, when the parents were American Indian. And most of those parents who didn’t get timely testing didn’t get any prenatal care at all.
In rural states, increasingly inadequate maternity care access is making intensified mother-to-child syphilis transmission all but inevitable. That puts Indigenous women and their newborns at especially high risk.”
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“One of the most promising solutions to South Dakota’s maternal care scarcity problem got a boost last year when the state’s voters approved an initiative to expand Medicaid beginning in early 2023. The expansion means more than 52,000 of the state’s residents are newly insured, which shifts the costs of their care from IHS to a better-funded federal program. It also means that hospitals caring for these patients will get paid more for the care they provide to the thousands of tribal residents newly covered by Medicaid. And most importantly to patients, expansion will make it more financially feasible to get the care they need.”
https://www.vox.com/health/2024/1/3/24010263/pregnancy-maternity-prenatal-care-deserts-rural-syphilis-indigenous-women-babies-south-dakota
The health care busts that follow mining’s boom-time benefits
“Mining companies offer good jobs with good benefits that can counterintuitively damage health care access. Health systems can grow dependent on those insurance plans to survive, and the benefits are in some cases so good that providers are reluctant to serve others in the community. It’s the consequence of a national health care system that feeds off employer-sponsored health insurance to turn a profit, and, as a result, warps itself to meet the needs of those who have it.
Six months of interviews with more than 90 patients, providers, retired miners, community leaders and health care experts across the U.S., including in three towns characteristic of the mining industry’s past, present and future — Williamson, West Virginia; Elko, Nevada; and White Sulphur Springs, Montana — reveal the breadth of these perils: retired and injured miners, and their families, struggling to get care; communities left with beleaguered or closed health facilities; and pricy hospital bills in towns where mines have driven up median incomes.”
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““Doctors want these big reimbursements from the very rich insurance policies that the gold mine provides. They don’t want the pennies they receive from Medicare,” said Jan Brizee, former ombudsman for the Nevada Office for Consumer Health Assistance representing Elko and other rural counties. “So you have somebody who’s retired after 25 or 30 years, and now they have nothing, having to travel out of town to get even primary care, let alone a specialist.”
Not all mining communities experience these problems, and similar issues exist in towns dependent on other industries with good benefits, like manufacturing. But mining communities face unique obstacles compared with other one-company towns — including remoteness and challenging geography — that make it difficult to attract other businesses that would diversify their health insurance landscape.
Miners also tend to be in worse health than their counterparts with other manual labor jobs, with higher rates of poor sleep and heart disease.”
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“Medicaid expansion and extra federal funding to support rural health centers and hospitals have helped in some towns. But providers bemoan stingy state Medicaid reimbursement rates that aren’t enough to pay the bills, paltry federal funding to support primary care and hospital designations that don’t meet the needs of all facilities.
For the most part, these solutions have inadequately addressed the systemic failures of employer-based health systems in these communities.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/10/mining-boom-local-health-care-00128143
The US doesn’t have universal health care — but these states (almost) do
“Universal health care remains an unrealized dream for the United States. But in some parts of the country, the dream has drawn closer to a reality in the 13 years since the Affordable Care Act passed.
Overall, the number of uninsured Americans has fallen from 46.5 million in 2010, the year President Barack Obama signed his signature health care law, to about 26 million today. The US health system still has plenty of flaws — beyond the 8 percent of the population who are uninsured, far higher than in peer countries, many of the people who technically have health insurance still find it difficult to cover their share of their medical bills. Nevertheless, more people enjoy some financial protection against health care expenses than in any previous period in US history.
The country is inching toward universal coverage. If everybody who qualified for either the ACA’s financial assistance or its Medicaid expansion were successfully enrolled in the program, we would get closer still: More than half of the uninsured are technically eligible for government health care aid.
Particularly in the last few years, it has been the states, using the tools made available by them by the ACA, that have been chipping away most aggressively at the number of uninsured.
Today, 10 states have an uninsured rate below 5 percent — not quite universal coverage, but getting close. Other states may be hovering around the national average, but that still represents a dramatic improvement from the pre-ACA reality: In New Mexico, for instance, 23 percent of its population was uninsured in 2010; now just 8 percent is.
Their success indicates that, even without another major federal health care reform effort, it is possible to reduce the number of uninsured in the United States. If states are more aggressive about using all of the tools available to them under the ACA, the country could continue to bring down the number of uninsured people within its borders.
The law gave states discretion to build upon its basic structure. Many received approval from the federal government to create programs that lower premiums; some also offer state subsidies in addition to the federal assistance to reduce the cost of coverage, including for people who are not eligible for federal aid, such as undocumented immigrants. A few states are even offering new state-run health plans that will compete with private offerings.”
https://www.vox.com/policy/23972827/us-aca-enrollment-universal-health-insurance
Patients don’t know how to navigate the US health system — and it’s costing them
“Research has shown that people will skip necessary care if they have even a small cost to pay, and recent surveys find one in three Americans say they have postponed medical treatment in the last year due to the cost.”
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“The Perry Undem survey, which polled nearly 2,700 Americans on behalf of the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and RIP Medical Debt, also detected widespread struggles to afford health care. About 7 in 10 people say they have received a medical bill that they could not afford, it found, and more than 60 percent of Americans said they had made some kind of sacrifice — delaying care, skipping appointments, changing the food they buy at the grocery store, etc. — in order to afford health care in the past two years.”
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“About 40 percent of people said they were always or frequently unsure how much their medical services would cost after they received care, according to the Perry Undem survey; another 30 percent said they were uncertain about the costs at least some of the time. Nearly two-thirds of US patients said they were at least sometimes unsure how much their insurance plan would cover after being treated.”
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“About 6 in 10 Americans said they had experienced a problem using their health insurance in the past year, according to KFF.”
https://www.vox.com/policy/2023/11/3/23943349/health-care-costs-medical-bills-debt-relief-forgiveness-insurance
Why the US is the only country that ties your health insurance to your job
https://www.vox.com/23890764/healthcare-insurance-marketplace-open-enrollment-employer-sponsored-united-blue-cross-shield-aetna
Fixing open enrollment starts with staying mad about it
“Almost four in 10 Americans — 38 percent — said that in 2022 they had put off medical care because of the cost, per Gallup. That is the highest number ever recorded since the polling firm started asking the question in 2001. Another survey, from KFF over the summer, found 28 percent had difficulty affording prescription drugs.
The truth is that insurance alone isn’t always enough to help people afford health care. The Commonwealth Fund concluded that 43 percent of Americans had been “inadequately insured” in 2022. That meant either they had been uninsured, had a gap in coverage during the year, or the insurance they had would not be adequate if they had an expensive medical emergency or diagnosis — for example, if their plan’s out-of-pocket costs could exceed 10 percent of their household income.
More than 40 percent of people said they had skipped care due to its cost, or they had trouble paying off medical bills, medical debt, or both.
It does not have to be this way. There is not one specific prescription for fixing health care. Countries have found various ways to make health insurance more affordable, standardized, and universal”
https://www.vox.com/policy/2023/10/16/23894085/health-insurance-open-enrollment-medical-dental-medicare-obamacare
What the GOP debate revealed about Republican health care hypocrisy
“On abortion, on health care for transgender people, even on mental health care, the candidates were comfortable flexing governmental authority to dictate the terms of medical treatment.
But when it comes to using that same authority to protect people during a global pandemic or providing health coverage to people with low incomes, they don’t want the government getting involved.”
https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/2023/8/25/23844263/republican-debate-national-abortion-ban-trans-care-covid
Biden to crack down on ‘junk’ health insurance
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/06/biden-health-insurance-00104951
The mysterious middlemen being blamed for America’s sky-high drug prices
“Pharmacy benefit managers are companies that, behind the scenes, determine what patients have to pay for medications. They manage insurance benefits for prescription drugs, dictating which drugs are covered by insurers and what costs patients will face when they fill their prescriptions.
To do that, they negotiate discounts, or rebates, with drug manufacturers and afford privileged status to the companies that give them the best deals.
And over the past few decades, as the prescription drug market has evolved and become more lucrative, so have PBMs. They run their own mail-order and specialty pharmacies. More recently, they have begun merging with health insurers, creating behemoth companies with the power to determine where and how billions of dollars are spent within the US health system.
Pharmacy benefit managers have become known as the mysterious middlemen of the pharma trade — and as a useful scapegoat for drug companies seeking to deflect blame from their own pricing practices.
Now the Senate, as part of forthcoming prescription drug legislation, appears poised to impose new rules on them. The committee overseeing health care debated last week a slew of measures requiring PBMs to be more transparent about their business and cracking down on some of their moneymaking practices.”
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“Experts generally agree that these companies play a role in driving up drug costs for some US patients, even as they negotiate discounts with drugmakers that benefit others, and that the amount of secrecy about their financial arrangements warrants scrutiny.
But reforms to the PBM industry aren’t a cure-all for making drugs more affordable: Sanders said the PBM measures being considered in the Senate would not meaningfully lower the cost of medicine for most people, even if they would bring more accountability and transparency to the sector.”