Editorial, Opinion Piece Address Health Care Costs, USA

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer recently published an editorial and an opinion piece that addressed the issue of health care costs. Summaries appear below.

Post-Intelligencer: The U.S. accounts for a "shocking" $1.7 trillion of the $3.3 trillion spent annually for health care worldwide and ranks 37th worldwide in quality of care, according to a Post-Intelligencer editorial. Other "advanced countries spend far less individually or as a society," but those nations have "guaranteed coverage for all," the editorial states, adding that "our problems of access, cost and quality are less alarming because they have incrementally grown as we lurch along with a unique, hybrid system haphazardly built around private care, employer insurance, inadequate federal dollars for the elderly and poor and the deadweight of insurance-industry bureaucracy." According to the editorial, "We must move beyond the Band-Aid fixes that politicians love to advocate for the interest of one group of consumers, doctors or campaign contributors," but "nothing will change until Americans decide our system doesn't have to be the way it is" (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 12/11).

John Newport, Post-Intelligencer: The current U.S. health care system "is clearly unsustainable," Newport, a health policy analyst and author, writes in a Post-Intelligencer opinion piece. According to Newport, the health care system "is wired backward, with preventative services taking a back seat to highly profitable, technologically based interventions" and health care costs "approaching $2 trillion per year." However, he writes that "a large share of the blame rests squarely with you and me for abrogating responsibility for our health," adding that "we have adopted lifestyle choices that are abysmally out of balance: Witness our nationwide epidemic of obesity and sedentary lifestyles." He concludes, "I am firmly convinced that if we could effectively motivate people to embrace truly health conscious lifestyles, we could easily cut our health care costs in half" and "dramatically improve our collective life expectancy and quality of life, while enabling all Americans to have ready access to affordable, high-quality care" (Newport, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 12/13).


"Reprinted with permission from kaisernetwork. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at kaisernetwork/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation . © 2005 Advisory Board Company and Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.

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