In his New York Times column yesterday, Nicholas Kristof wrote about the low-tech factor that has a huge impact on health outcomes: access to medical care. He writes:
In short, great health care is often less about breakthrough technologies than it is about access. And for all the disagreements about President Obama’s health care proposal, let’s focus on this: it unquestionably would increase access, while its defeat would diminish access.
Most of American history has seen a steady increase in access to first-rate health care. But we’re now seeing a reversal of this long trend. A new report has found that one-quarter of Californians are now uninsured.
and:
Partly because of lack of access, American health statistics are notorious: Our children are two-and-a-half times as likely to die before the age of 5 as children in Sweden. American women are 11 times as likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth as Irish women. The average person in Honduras or Vietnam is expected to live longer than the average African-American in New Orleans.
Opponents of health care reform claim that America’s health statistics are poor simply because of America’s racial diversity and large underclass. But there is one group of Americans who do fine in international comparisons — and that’s the 65-plus crowd. They have Medicare.
One careful study after another has shown that uninsured people are significantly more likely to die than insured people. That’s because diseases are caught at later stages on uninsured people, and they don’t get treated so well.
and:
The tide of history has taken us and other Western countries toward steadily greater access to medical coverage — until recent reversals in the United States. Put aside quarrels over the mechanisms used to pass the bill, and focus on the central question of Americans’ access to decent medical care. On that issue, those trying to kill this health care reform proposal are simply on the wrong side of history.
Read the entire column here.
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