It may surprise you to learn that America is spending 1/5 of its total annual budget on health care, so why does it sometimes feel like scraping the bottom of the barrel when poor families look for sources to pay hospital bills? Twenty percent on health spending sounds like enough, but when compared to Egypt, for example, which allocates just over 23% to health, it puts everything in proper perspective.
You might argue that it’s unfair to compare Egypt to the US when the authoritarian state doesn’t have the same budget as the (arguably) most powerful country in the world, even though the US outnumbers Egypt in terms of population (about 312 million to Egypt is estimated at 77 million) and you may have a case. Saudi Arabia would be a better model to compare to the US, but do you know how much the kingdom’s state allocates for health spending? Almost half of your total budget!
Here’s a bit of a reality check: Socialized medicines in socialist countries like Cuba mean that their citizens have a better ability to pay hospital bills than the average middle-class family in the US.
No one is suggesting that we change our form of government to socialism, but there is a lesson to be learned here. The problem is that the whole system is geared towards private companies making an excessive profit from the insured to cover the uninsured.
All this shows that having the greatest amount of resources is not the only determining factor for having an efficient health system. A 2007 study by the World Health Organization revealed that 11 rich countries allocate less to health compared to almost 25% of the world’s impoverished countries. That’s something to ponder when thinking about how the US healthcare system has so much room for improvement.
In fact, reforms are needed to make proactive decisions to improve the health industry instead of always being reactionary. Millions of Americans who cannot pay their hospital bills turn to bankruptcy attorneys for help. Who else is helping them?