Case, Anne, and Angus Deaton. “The Sickness of Our System.” TIME Magazine, vol. 195, no. 7/8, Mar. 2020, pp. 80–81. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.citytech.ezproxy.cuny.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=141838308&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

In this article in Time Magazine, the authors point out the flaws of the American healthcare system. They begin by outlining the fact that in 2017, healthcare costs per person were about five times what the country spent on defense per person, and about three times what the country spent on education per person. According to the authors, this is not good as it simply inflates earnings for providers and bloats the industry, while at the same time holding down wages and destroying jobs. The authors compare American health quality and costs to other countries and find that other countries had a higher life expectancy while spending less money, indicating that higher costs didn’t necessarily equate to higher quality. Another problem, the authors outline, is that the politics within the healthcare community contribute to the higher costs. They say that physician-led groups have successfully kept salaries up by purposefully keeping the number of positions low and rejecting foreign medical professionals who would be assets. The final point in this article is that the government itself is complicit in this imbalance, and that “the industry that is supposed to improve our health is undermining it”.

From the information given in this article, I am extremely shocked that this system has been permitted to go on, and that it seems too large to change. The problems seem to be deeply rooted, numerous, and reform would have to be an extremely uphill battle. The most surprising piece of data that I found was the case of the comparison with the Swiss, in that they spent 30% less per person on healthcare yet they lived 5.1 years longer than Americans in 2017. That number is mind-boggling to think about because any rational person would think that with higher prices, the quality is sure to be higher, but that seems to not be the case with the American healthcare system.

“Americans like to believe that their system is a free-market one, in spite of the fact that the government is paying half of the cost, is paying the prices demanded by pharmaceutical companies without negotiation, is permitting professional associations to restrict supply, and is subsidizing employer-provided health care through the tax system.”