Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle Over Health Care Reform
by Paul Starr
Yale University Press, 324 pp., $28.50
Inside National Health Reform
by John E. McDonough
University of California Press/Milbank, 339 pp., $34.95
Fighting for Our Health: The Epic Battle to Make Health Care a Right in the United States
by Richard Kirsch
Rockefeller Institute Press, 396 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Pete Souza/White House
President Obama signing the prosthetic arm of Sergeant Carlos Evans at the White House, March 2012. Evans was injured in Afghanistan during his fourth combat deployment.
Except for the US, no rich nation in the world fails to provide comprehensive health care that is free or inexpensive to its entire population. Yet roughly 50 million Americans, 16 percent of the population, have no health insurance at all; most of them are relatively poor and nearly one third of them are age eighteen to thirty-four.
The proportion of uninsured has been rising steadily since the 1970s. Research by the Kaiser Family Foundation and others finds that those without health insurance die younger, work less due to chronic health conditions, and face persistent personal financial problems brought on by illnesses. A Harvard Medical School study found that some 45,000 deaths a year are associated with lack of health insurance. We can also safely conjecture that many people without health insurance limit their ability to enjoy a full life for fear of accident or serious disease. Those who are forced to go to public hospitals for treatment as their only recourse often get it too late—and the costs for treatment of disease and injury neglected for too long are high.
Despite the lack of coverage for one out of six citizens, Americans pay more than 17 percent of the Gross Domestic Product for their health care, more than any other rich nation by far. Yet America’s health care system is not measurably better and often considerably worse than that of other rich nations. For example, the US ranks forty-eighth in infant mortality among all nations, and its position has been falling. In 1960, the US ranked twelfth.
Moreover, rising costs of health care will be the principal causes of soaring federal budget deficits starting in the mid-2020s because they will push up expenditures on Medicare and Medicaid benefits rapidly. The projected rise in federal health spending has encouraged historically radical proposals from congressmen, notably the Republican Representative Paul Ryan, to transform Medicare from a single-payer plan, in which the government raises taxes and pays doctors and other private providers for medical care, into a system of vouchers, subsidized by the government, with which the elderly will choose between Medicare and privately offered insurance programs, though the annual increase in the value of the vouchers is not expected to keep up with the increase in the costs of health care.
In March 2010, after sixty years of failed proposals, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), sponsored by President Obama, was passed by Congress following a year of laborious and heated congressional negotiations. It is America’s first program to provide coverage for almost all citizens, bringing health insurance to some 32 million more Americans. Half of the newly insured would be covered by significantly expanded Medicaid, the government program for the poor. The other half would be subject to an individual mandate, requiring them to sign up for …
