The US health system is the most high cost and dysfunctional health care system in the world.
The reason is that it is privatized. In the rest of
Western civilization the system is socialized.
By Dr Paul Craig Roberts: The reason health care is socialized in civilized countries is not only to provide health care to citizens who otherwise could not afford it, but also to reduce the cost. In a privatized system, a profit has to be turned at every level: the general practitioner, the specialist, the diagnostic facility, the ambulance service, the emergency room, the hospital, the hospice, the health insurance company. All of these levels of profit build up the cost.
In the hybrid system with which the US is afflicted, regulation drives the cost even higher. It is not only government regulation because of Medicare and Medicaid, but also private regulation imposed by private insurance companies. In America, alone in the world, medical care comes second to paperwork.
Doctors working in medical clinics have to dictate the results of each patient seen, the diagnosis, the treatment, and so forth, in sufficient detail to satisfy the payer of the bill, whether public or private. The dictation time eats into the doctor’s treatment time. In other words, the paper work requirements reduce the amount of time the doctor has to see patients. The paperwork also requires nurses to organize and compile it. And this is not the end of it.
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As if she were incapable of thinking about power differently, a widely acclaimed classicist speaking from the commanding heights of the symbolic economy declares that women’s voices are silenced. No one laughs. About three hundred years after a woman translated the Odyssey into French, the first woman with a first name that begins with a vowel translated the Odyssey into English. The nightingale Itylus sings mournfully for her dead son. Should we hope that a woman whose first name begins with a consonant will pioneer a new Odyssey translation that breaks from the dominant English meter and finally offers fresh insights into gender? We must overturn the intellectual hierarchy. A Homeric cento written in Late Antiquity offers reason for hope.