Mamdani, universal health coverage, and the scandal of profits over healthcare

First, let me offer congratulations to Zohran Mamdani and the people of New York who elected him. While the news focus is on him, and of course he merits it, it is the “them” that is more important. New Yorkers showed that they want someone who stands with and for them, for their needs, for their ability to afford rent, and healthcare, and education, and food, rather than for the developers and billionaires and financiers (overlapping groups) who have long controlled the city. It should be a wakeup call to the finance-oriented Democrats, not to mention the Republicans who only stand for the oppression of people. Maybe he will be able to deliver on his promise of universal health care in the city, and maybe not, but what he, and they, have shown is that this is something people want. People most assuredly do NOT want the interests of insurance company profit to even be in the same discussion as a value in comparison to their health and healthcare, and they shouldn’t.

What is remarkable is the number of people in positions of power who do. This can, accurately, be attributed both to the financial support insurers give to politicians (and pundits) and the fact that they hang around with each other. Polls have shown that large majorities of Americans support universal health care, and the NYC election was another important such “poll”. But, in fact, things are going in the opposite direction for healthcare and the health of the American people. The party of Snidely Whiplash (PSW) is doing everything it can to make people’s lives worse. They have made it eminently clear that they don’t think all Americans should have health coverage by keeping the government shut down rather than talk about continuing the subsidies for ACA demanded by the Democrats. 

And remember that lots of things besides healthcare coverage affect health – access to adequate food is one of the main ones. So, because, I guess, the PSW so enjoys being mean, they have cut SNAP (food stamps) benefits dramatically, so that more children can go hungry. Twirl that mustache, Snidely! In Tucson, as around the country, food banks that are already overwhelmed will see huge increases in need. We just loaded up the car with boxes of food for the community food bank donated by members of our HOA. They were particularly heavy because of the cans of beans, tuna, chicken, and peanut butter donated especially because the food bank is often out of protein. Which, you may recall, people, and especially growing children, need! You see, grants for the food bank to buy this food from local farmers, which benefitted the farmers as well, have been cut off. Just when you thought we couldn’t be meaner, har har har! 

Government policies that cut aid for food and healthcare are terribly damaging to Americans’ health. Rural hospitals are closing because so many of their patients are covered by Medicaid, which has been dramatically cut. Telehealth programs that might have helped fill that gap are ending. If anyone still believed the private, for-profit sector (as opposed to the volunteer non-profit sector, like food banks) might step into help, they are doing the opposite. Recent insurance company actions have doubled down on limiting access to care, paying for care, and of course caring. Just a few recent actions detailed by Health Care Un-covered include ‘Coverage Without Care: The Cruel Math of Health Insurance Open Enrollment’ and  ‘UnitedHealth CEO Says Company is Cutting Thousands of Doctors Out of Network to Boost Profits‘. You thought it was already hard to find a doctor? The largest health insurance company in the nation doesn’t care; it does care about making more money! Remember that when you see their ads on TV!

Many people – well, pundits, not actual people – say the problem is people need to have jobs, to contribute to the economy. Others, perhaps (?) more well-meaning suggest people need more education about how to choose and navigate the health insurance system so they are not (or are at least less) screwed. Baloney. Read this story on the KFF site about Dr. Lauren Hughes, whose car was T-boned 20 miles from her home. She had injuries including a broken ankle, but the hospital to which she was taken was “out of network” for her insurance, and she ended up with a $64K bill! Dr. Hughes is a highly-educated, knowledgeable, skilled and experienced family physician, who also leads a health policy research group at the University of Colorado. She knows way more about how the system works than most people – heck, than most doctors! And she still was screwed (not just with the ones in her ankle)! Because of her knowledge, role, and indeed clout, and the support of others she was able to get most of the insurance company decision reversed, but good luck if it is you, or someone else who has less of all of those advantages!

The KFF piece is full of phrases that should infuriate, and nauseate, any decent human being, like “out of network”, “surprise billing”, “uncovered care”, “observation status”. These are all strategies (“gimmicks” would minimize their significance) to make more profit for insurance companies by denying you health care. Another recent Health Care Un-covered piece discusses ‘Where Do Our Health Insurance Premiums Go?’, and the answer is profits, stock buy-backs, lobbying, executive salaries. Not increasing coverage or access, decreasing rates; indeed, quite the opposite: as profits go up, so does consumer cost, while access goes down! In any other country, these phrases would be anathema. Every other country that can possibly be considered “wealthy” or even “middle income” (an international classification that almost any American would still see as “poor”) has universal health care. The concept that any person, not to mention a “well-insured”, educated, professional – physician! -- would have such indignities heaped on them and not receive the care they need as a right of their citizenship (and in many countries, even non-citizens) would outrage them. I would like to remind folks of two pieces I wrote long ago, both coincidentally related to films. One thing to NOT worry about: paying for health care -- in France, is from 2012. It discusses the film Le Havre, and how amid the tribulations of being poor, worry about paying for necessary health care was not one of them. The other, from 2009, "Sick Around America": A little bit sickening, talks about TR Reid’s special “Sick around the world” and something from it that has stayed with me.

In each country he [Reid] asked how many of their citizens went bankrupt as a result of health care debts, and they all said none. The most dramatic response was from the President of the Swiss Confederation, a conservative who had originally opposed the Swiss program in the early 90s. “No one,” he boomed in his French-accented English, “why, it would be a national scandal!”

It should be a national scandal here; indeed, it is a scandal that, for so many it is not. The American people know this, and increasingly will be punishing politicians who do not care, or who, with a total lack of not only empathy but any moral or religious compass at all, put the financial profits of insurance companies above the health of our people, when in fact it should have ZERO weight.

Back in 1958, Harry Golden, a writer, humorist, and published of the Carolina Israelite wrote the best-seller “Only in America”. At the time, reviewers’ comments focused on his being a Southern Jew, and on his support for integration (the moral issue of that age). But it is sad to think that nearly 70 years later, “Only in America” refers to the lack of a universal health care system, unique among the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the rich) countries.

It is long past time to change that!

US Maternal Mortality Rate Exemplifies Moral Bankruptcy of Our Health System

My friend, Dr. Don Frey, recently published America’s DWP Crisis: Dying While Pregnant (DWP) on his blog, “A Family Doctor Looks at the World”. It leads with shocking and distressing statistics about the US maternal mortality rate, which has long been the highest in the “developed world” and has been steadily increasing. Citing a recent article in JAMA, Trends in State-Level Maternal Mortality by Racial and Ethnic Group in the United States (LG Fleszar, AG Bryant, CO Johnson, July 3, 2023), he  points out that in the 20 years from 1999 to 2019 US maternal mortality more than doubled (it actually went up 2.5 times):

In every corner of the country, for every ethnic group, outcomes worsened.  By 2019, deaths per 100,000 pregnancies (the benchmark measure) had increased from 12.7 to 32.2.  For Black and American Indian women, the picture was much worse.  Their mortality skyrocketed to 55.4 and 49.2, respectively.

And this doesn’t even include deaths from accidents and homicide – the latter being the #1 cause of death for pregnant women in the US!

Let’s stop and think about that. In the rest of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, = wealthy) countries maternal mortality is going down. For the most recent reported years, it ranges from about 1.6 to 8.8, with most below 5. When we were at 12.7 we were way out of the picture. Now we are at 32.2! And our rates for minority women are like poor countries! Even though the maternal mortality rate is high and rising for all races and ethnicities, it is made even higher by the ridiculously high rates for some populations. In what conceivable way could this be compatible with the US having “the best healthcare in the world”, or anything approaching it? Only if you accept the definition of “well, the best healthcare is available for some people, who can afford it, but not even for most Americans”.

Dr. Frey points to several reasons why our “DWP” (and our dying-while-recently-pregnant, ie, post-partum) rate is so high, and they are valid, and addressing them would certainly significantly lower it. The major one is what we often refer to as “the social determinants of health”. This is a fine term, except it has almost become routine to cite them while we, as a country, continue to do little or nothing to address them. People are much more likely to have poor health status if they are financially poor, poorly nourished, poorly housed, poorly educated and live with ongoing danger and the fear that comes from it. And when those bad things happen in childhood, their risk continues higher for the rest of their lives. We call this “ACEs”, Adverse Childhood Events, and the higher number and degree of ACEs, the worse the outcome for not only those children but for the adults that they will become. Thus a person who grew up poor is likely to have worse health status as an adult than a neighbor who did not grow up poor, even if they end up with similar incomes and lifestyles. In addition to the ACEs that have their origin in poverty, there are others, ranging from growing up in a family with adults who abuse alcohol and other drugs, to parents’ divorce, to death of a parent, to physical and sexual abuse, that can occur in any socioeconomic group.

Dr. Frey also cites the number of states that have passed – and implemented – “anti-woman” laws, usually under the guise of being “anti-abortion”. While the legislators who propose and vote for them, and the state governments implementing them, would deny that they are anti-woman, the facts speak otherwise. A good example that Dr. Frey discusses, is

Last year in Missouri, for example, the legislature debated whether to outlaw surgery for ectopic pregnancies (an embryo that implants in the fallopian tube instead of the uterus), even though such pregnancies are 100% non-viable.  Apparently, the near-certainty of a mother’s tubal rupture, internal bleeding, sepsis, and death, wasn’t particularly important.

That law has not passed (so far) but many others have so limited access to abortion that women have to travel very far, have waiting periods, get illegal abortions, and otherwise risk their lives. Despite the ostensible justification for anti-abortion laws is to protect the “unborn”, the result is to increase the risk to fetuses, newborns, and their mothers. Dramatically.

There are also medical and healthcare factors that contribute to the maternal mortality rate in this country. As much as the social determinants of health, and anti-abortion anti-woman laws, contribute to the problem, medical care can make a difference. But too many women are not able to access good medical care for their pregnancies and births, in the prenatal and especially in the post-partum period. Among the important factors are the number and type of providers, geographic distribution of those providers, preference of providers for the kind of care that they want to do (or not do), and the ownership of practices and hospital by corporations that are interested mainly in money-making.

Let’s look at providers. Usually we think of obstetricians (OB-GYNs) as the people who deliver babies. And they do. Or at least many of them do. Actually, a minority, decreasing in % as they age. Doing gynecologic surgery is much more lucrative, and doesn’t require getting up at all hours to do deliveries. Plus, like most specialists, they are concentrated in urban (but not poor or inner-city) and suburban areas. So access to them is limited, especially geographically and financially. Certified Nurse-Midwives (CNMs) and family physicians also deliver babies, but often have the same “lifestyle” disincentives. Nurse-midwives are by definition about delivering (or “catching”) babies but usually are subservient to the dictates of the OB-GYN community. OBs probably do not mind if CNMs -- or family physicians -- deliver babies where the OBs do not want to be (rural and inner-city areas) but training programs may not have enough deliveries to allow them to learn. While nurse-midwives are a separate profession, their training may not strongly encourage them to assert themselves in practice.

And there is huge gap is in post-partum care. It is not uncommon for OBs (and, perhaps, others) to believe their job is done when the baby emerges, or at least when the woman is discharged. But as Dr. Frey’s piece points out, a very large number of maternal deaths take place in the post-partum period, up to 6 weeks after delivery, from bleeding, infection, and other causes that could be identified with the kind of close follow-up that too frequently does not occur. Not to mention identifying the risks for homicide (and suicide) in the situation in which the women lives.

Finally, but far from least important, is the structure of the medical care system. I have written extensively in previous blog posts about how hospitals and medical practices are run as businesses, to make money, rather than as facilities dedicated to improving the health of communities and the people in them. Birth, and the accompanying circumstances including maternal mortality, make a particular case. The businesses, as well as the physicians who work for them, are interested mainly in providing care when and where it is relatively easy and most profitable. This is understandable, but it is unacceptable. It is, at bottom, the cause of all the other problems. Receiving care for childbirth –including the prenatal and postpartum periods, as with all necessary medical services, should not be treated as luxury goods.

It may be OK that some people have a Lexus or Tesla, others a Toyota or Chevy, and still others an old clunker, while many have to walk or ride the bus. But it is not ok for healthcare, and specifically not childbirth. Women need to have access to excellent care no matter how much money they have or where they live.

That they do not is yet another indictment of a system built on profit rather than health.

Why can't the US have health coverage for everyone? We CAN!

Every other wealthy country in the world has long since figured out how to provide health coverage to its entire population. Every one. And yet this is still controversial in the United States, as continues to be illustrated by the recent Democratic debates.

Every one of those Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries has better health outcomes than the US as result of covering everyone. The health outcomes are not always terrific, but better, as a population, than ours. There are two components to how healthcare is provided; one is how it is distributed (very inequitably in the US and much more equitably in the other countries) and how well it is funded. The second might depend upon a nation’s resources, the first upon its values. Some of these other countries should, and could, increase their health funding (e.g., Canada) but the fact remains that they are doing better because they distribute it better. And, even when well-funded, a national health plan costs less – far less, in every other country – than we spend in the US.

So we have the money, and we are ostensibly spending it on health care. Indeed, if we count not only the direct public expenditures by governments (federal, state, local) for their employees and for Medicare and Medicaid and S-CHIP and other programs, but also the income foregone by government because the health insurance premiums paid by employers (although not by employees) are tax-exempt, it is about 60% of our health expenditures. In other words the US spends more PUBLIC money than other countries spend altogether. Another way of thinking about it is that we are paying for a national health program but not getting it.

So why does this continue to be controversial? Why do the majority of Democratic presidential candidates not support it? Why do there continue to be questions from moderators at the last debate asking Sen. Sanders how much it would cost and how it would be paid for? One possible answer is that these candidates and questioners are ignorant of the facts, and ignore those repeated time and time again by both Sen. Sanders and Sen. Warren, explaining that we are already spending more than it would cost for Medicare for All. The other possibility is that it is part of a concerted campaign to obfuscate and lie about the issue to protect wealthy and powerful interests.

Let us start with the first. Maybe they are just ignorant of the facts, or maybe they are too stupid to understand them (I doubt that). Sanders responded to a questioner that the cost of a national health insurance system, Medicare for All, that covers everyone in the US for everything (including things that we don’t get now with most health insurances, like hearing aids and glasses ), with no out-of-pocket costs for co-pays or deductibles, will cost less than we are currently spending. This is made possible by re-directing those dollars currently being ostensibly spent on health care and actually spending them on health care, rather than on administrative costs and profit for health insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and some big health care providers. A new article in the Annals of Internal Medicine, “Health Care Administrative Costs in the United States and Canada,

2017” by Himmelstein, Campbell, and Woolhandler (Ann Intern Med. doi:10.7326/M19-2818, online publication January 7, 2020), shows that:

U.S. insurers and providers spent $812 billion on administration, amounting to $2497 per capita (34.2% of national health expenditures) versus $551 per capita (17.0%) in Canada: $844 versus $146 on insurers' overhead; $933 versus $196 for hospital administration; $255 versus $123 for nursing home, home care, and hospice administration; and $465 versus $87 for physicians' insurance-related costs.

This represents 31% of all US health care costs, twice the rate of administrative costs in Canada. Since they excluded some areas that are accounted for differently in Canada, it is likely an underestimate. They add that “Of the 3.2-percentage point increase in administration's share of U.S. health expenditures since 1999, 2.4 percentage points was due to growth in private insurers' overhead, mostly because of high overhead in their Medicare and Medicaid managed-care plans.” These are the Medicare (and Medicaid) managed-care plans that the Trump administration lauds as the best part of Medicare, as I noted in a quote from CMS administrator Seema Verma in “Scamming Medicare: It's the providers and insurers, not the patients!” on December 22, 2019. Another very recent piece, a systematic review of studies on the cost and financing of single-payer health care in the US, “Projected costs of single-payer healthcare financing in the United States: A systematic review of economic analyses” published in PLOS One by Cai, et al. “found a high degree of analytic consensus for the fiscal feasibility of a single-payer approach in the US.” (PLOS Medicine | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003013 January 15, 2020).

So the other explanation, the more likely explanation since these people are not, in fact, stupid and probably not at this point ignorant, is willfully ignoring the facts because they threaten a status quo that is extremely lucrative for a lot of big companies, insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies especially, and a lot of big providers, hospitals and health systems. (This includes those that are ostensibly “non-profit”, which means that they don’t pay shareholders – and don’t pay taxes! – but doesn’t keep them from making lots of money which they invest back into the services that will make them more money – e.g., orthopedics, cardiology, cancer, ICUs -- rather than those the community as a whole really needs but are not money makers – e.g., mental health, primary care, etc. -- and paying their C-suite executives salaries in the millions!) These companies are absolutely not interested in losing this money, and they are big contributors to politicians.

This is abetted, indeed stimulated, by a tremendous disinformation campaign by insurance companies, following upon the model developed by car companies and cigarette manufacturers. The most obvious is the perversion of the language of “choice”, exposed by former health insurance executive Wendell Potter in the New York Times on January 14, 2020. When they say “choice” they mean choice of insurance plan. In addition to the fact that most Americans are limited to a choice between one or two plans that their employer offers, people don’t care about choosing their insurance company (“I’m an Aetna guy!” “I love CIGNA!”); they care about choosing their doctors and other providers and hospitals – the very things that the private health insurance industry restricts!

But could we not, somehow, keep private insurance as an option, as suggested by most of the Democratic candidates and pundits? A qualified yes. In countries that do this, say Switzerland, there are private insurance companies but they are highly regulated. ALL have to provide the SAME coverage and ALL have to charge the SAME price. How do they compete? Wait for it -- on customer service!! Are US insurance companies ready to do this?

To a disturbing degree, people are swayed by these lies. Sometimes you hear the myth that goes something like “Americans don’t have a sense of social responsibility like people in ‘X’ do”, but they do. As Cai points out, “Public support for provision of universal health coverage through a plan like Medicare for All is as high as 70%, but falls when costs are emphasized,” even though almost all Americans would pay less for much more – and critically, all Americans would be covered. What is unacceptable is that the “responsible” media and (hopefully, if we’re going to vote for them) “responsible” politicians, in the debates and in their coverage, repeat these lies.

We also sometimes hear the question “what will all those people who work for insurance companies do if they are closed down?” It is a legitimate one, and one for which the Medicare for All bills prescribe retraining, but the real issue is why is this asked only for this industry and never about workers who lose their jobs because companies relocate their manufacturing and services overseas? Why is the cost never an issue when we are talking about military expenditures (not for pay for personnel, no, but for incredibly expensive and profitable armaments), but only when we are talking about people’s health?

Americans as a whole pay a huge amount for health care, in premiums paid by individuals and their employers, in tax dollars for Medicare and Medicaid, and in out-of-pocket co-pays, deductibles, and huge drug costs. What we get are some people with good coverage, most people with mediocre coverage, and a lot of people with poor or no coverage. Every "scandal" about someone getting a $100,000 bill from an out-of-network doctor at an in-network hospital, about a $30,000 / month medication, about denial of necessary care, is not fluke but a built-in part of our crazy non-system.  Medicare for All, as in the Sanders Senate bill (S.1129) and the Jayapal House bill (HR.1384) will cover EVERYONE for EVERYTHING.

Let’s do it. Now. And let’s have our media and politicians stop repeating the insurance-company funded lies about it.

Treatments that don't cure the disease; we are spending money on the wrong things

In “Heralded treatments often fail to live up to their promise” (Kansas City Star, May 17, 2014), Alan Bavley, writing with Scott Canon, continues to demonstrate that he is one of the excellent health journalists – excellent journalists – in the US, along with Elisabeth Rosenthal of the New York Times. The common practice in the news media (and, thanks to a typo, “medica”) is to hype the new, exciting, dramatic, expensive, and hard to believe even though you want to. In politics, we often see the media acting as flaks for the government, the rich, and the powerful (sometimes, of course, these can be in conflict). Bavley and Rosenthal  and their ilk actually do investigative journalism, trying to the best of their ability to find out the truth rather than to reprint press releases.

The article begins with a review of a surgical procedure that was designed to control high blood pressure (hypertension) without drugs, by cutting some of the nerves to the kidneys. It made sense, it was seen as a big breakthrough (“The potential benefit was huge,” said a cardiologist). Unfortunately, when actually subjected to appropriate scientific study, it didn’t work. Or, rather, it worked just as well as placebo, a sham surgical procedure. The same cardiologist remarks ““This could be considered the biggest disappointment in cardiology of this century, but “the medical community went about it right.” 

Science worked. Unfortunately, the authors add,

“If only that were always the case. A combination of industry marketing, overly eager doctors, demanding patients and news media ready to cheer on anything that sounds like a breakthrough is popularizing many drugs, surgeries and other treatments long before they’re adequately tested. Far too often, they’re ultimately proved ineffective, no better than older, cheaper therapies, or even hazardous. Billions of dollars are wasted and tens of millions of patients are put at risk”

Yup. They go on to cite the Vioxx scandal, in which Merck concealed evidence of its biggest-selling drug causing an increase in heart disease. But that was taken off the market; many other unproven (or worse, proven to be ineffective) treatments are not. They talk about arthroscopic knee surgery, still often being done for conditions for which it has been shown to be no more effective than a sham procedure. They discuss surgical robots, costing upwards of $1.5 million, and proton-beam radiation treatments (those babies, the machines, really cost a lot!) for which the evidence of effectiveness compared to more standard and much cheaper treatment is mixed, at best. But hey, if you’re a hospital, and the competition has robots and proton-beam accelerators, who’s going to come to you if you don’t have one? Poor people? Heaven forfend!

And it is all about getting the advantage on the competition to make more money. A good argument can, and should, be made that competition in hospitals helps no one. That if there were an expensive item that there were an actual medical need for one of in the community, there should be one, not one at every hospital. But that would presume that the goal of the health system was to increase the health of the American people at the lowest effective cost. It isn’t. It’s to make money. If I can get your patients to come to me instead, it is seen as a victory (from a competitive business sense). It is really a loss for the health of our people and the pocketbooks of us all.

It is particularly depressing because that money is not buying us health. If you still harbored the belief that “we have the best health care system in the world”, it’s time to acknowledge that you are wrong (although we forgive you given the hype!). We should all know how expensive our health care system is, that we spend way more than any of the other developed countries (members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD). The attached graph, from Steven Woolf, MD, PhD, who was a plenary speaker at the recent Society of Teachers of Family Medicine Annual Conference, shows a comparison of spending and life expectancy for the OECD countries. That’s the US way off to the right, spending more than anyone by far, but having a life expectancy close to the Czech Republic. Better than Mexico, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Turkey, but at enormously greater cost!

Woolf was the lead author of the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) recent report “Shorter Lives, Poorer Health” , which presents depressing, but unfortunately accurate, data on our health status. We are among the “leaders” in death rates from communicable and non-communicable diseases and from injuries. Only for a few causes are our death rates better than the average. Our life expectancy at birth is worse than any of the 17 comparison countries for men, and second worst for women. Our probability of survival to age 50 is lower than any of 21 comparison countries. At any age until 75, we are never better than 15 out of 17 in terms of life expectancy. We do have better survival rates once we reach age 75, but there is no information on how much of that is keeping people alive despite poor quality of life.

Want more? In case you think it is only the minority populations (although that would be part of our population), non-Hispanic whites rank no higher than 16 of 17 at any age below 55. And the only portion of our population for whom mortality rates have risen is non-Hispanic whites with less than 12 years of education. From 2005-2009, the US had the highest infant mortality rate of the 17 countries and the 31st highest in the OECD. Non-Hispanic whites and mothers with 16+ years of education also have higher infant mortality rates than those in other countries. Among the 17 peer countries, mortality from transport accidents decreased by 42% in the OECD between 1995 and 2009, but by only 11% in the US. The same trends hold for child and adolescent health – and ill-health and mortality.

And then there are the areas where we really shine, particularly health issues related to guns.

• In 2007, 69% of US homicides (73% of homicides before age 50) involved firearms, compared with 26% in peer countries.
• A 2003 study found that the US homicide rate was 7 times higher (the rate of firearm homicides was 20 times higher) than in 22 OECD countries.
• Although US suicide rates were lower than in those countries, firearm suicide rates were 6 times higher.

We have the highest child poverty rates in the OECD, our preschool enrollment is below most countries, and the ratio of social services spending to medical spending is below almost all other OECD countries.

This is insanity. We are spending enormous amounts of money, but we are spending it so that our hospitals can compete with each other, so that we can deliver the most expensive and high-tech care whether it benefits people’s health or not, and we then do not have any money left to do the things that would really enhance health: expanding education, creating jobs, decreasing poverty, ensuring that people had homes and enough to eat.

Not to mention the guns.

The State of US Health: improved over 20 years, but not nearly enough

An enormous, and enormously important, study was recently published online-ahead-of-print in JAMA describing the state of health in the US and comparing it that in other 33 “developed” countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). “The State of US Health, 1990-2010: Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors”[1] was written by the members of the US Burden of Disease Collaboration, an enormous group of population-health scholars from institutions across the country and a few from other parts of the world. The methods used are incredibly complex; indeed editorialist and President of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Harvey V. Fineberg, MD PhD (“The State of Health in the United States”)[2] calls it “…an arcane and complex process, and despite the authors’ best efforts to explain their methods and make data available, few readers will fully understand how the results are derived.” Nonetheless, the findings are incredibly important.

Here are the main results:

Since 1990, the health status of the US has improved in most areas.

·         Average life expectancy has increased, from 75.2 to 78.2 years;

·         Healthy life expectancy (HALE) has increased, from 65.8 to 68.1 years;

These are good things; that is, they are moving in the right direction. However, they are moving in the right direction more slowly than in the other OECD countries, so that, since 1990, the US rank for life expectancy (at birth) has dropped from 20^th to 27^th among these 34 countries, and the HALE has dropped from 14^th to 26^th!

A few more terms, not that hard to understand: Life expectancy is decreased by the years of life lost through premature (age-standardized) death due to disease or injury (YLL). The difference between absolute life expectancy and HALE is the number of years lived with disability (YLD). The sum of YLL and YLD is expressed as disability-adjusted life years (DALY), kind of the complement of HALE. That is, the lower the DALY, the fewer years of life have been either lost to premature death or lived with disability. From 1990, the US rank among the OECD countries has dropped in all these areas:

·         From 18^th to 27^th in age-standardized death rate;

·         From 23^rd to 28^th in YLL;

·         From 5^th to 6^th in age-standardized YLD.

These are not good things. The table indicates, for each of the 34 countries, the rank for YLL for each of 25 conditions: green means significantly better than the mean, yellow about the mean, and red significantly worse. The US is green in only one (stroke), and is red in 15!

The other important thing done by the study’s authors was to look at risk factors for YLL and YLD in the US. As Fineberg explains, this is a complicated and difficult task,”…attempting to estimate the contribution of each risk factor to premature death.” It is easier to measure mortality (death) than morbidity (disability), but it is important because, as noted in the abstract, “As the US population has aged, YLDs have comprised a larger share of DALYs than YLLs.” That is, years lived with disability exceeds years of life lost from treatable disease. This makes sense; as we have developed increasingly sophisticated (and costly) high-tech interventions to prevent death (discussed by me, for example, in Primary Care Contributes More than Money..., June 2, 2013), we have increased the number of years that people are kept alive but suffering from the symptoms and complications of their diseases. The article's abstract contains 4 sentences that describe this:

• “The diseases and injuries with the largest number of YLLs in 2010 were ischemic heart disease, lung cancer, stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and road injury.
• Age-standardized YLL rates increased for Alzheimer disease, drug use disorders, chronic kidney disease, kidney cancer, and falls.
• The diseases with the largest number of YLDs in 2010 were low back pain, major depressive disorder, other musculoskeletal disorders, neck pain, and anxiety disorders….
• The leading risk factors related to DALYs were dietary risks, tobacco smoking, high body mass index, high blood pressure, high fasting plasma glucose, physical inactivity, and alcohol use.”

The largest number of YLLs were caused by the “traditional” chronic diseases, while most of the conditions that increased YLL over the last 20 years were those that one would expect to increase as we keep people alive longer, particularly Alzheimer’s disease, chronic kidney disease, falls, and drug use disorders (which includes not just “illicit” or “illegal” drug use, but those taking prescription drugs, in particular for chronic pain – which comprise a large proportion of the diseases that have the largest number of YLDs -- back pain, other musculoskeletal disorders, neck pain).

These findings should guide our population/public health interventions. And the leading risk factors for DALYs are not surprising; they are the ones that we hear about all the time: dietary risks, tobacco smoking, high body mass index, high blood pressure, high fasting plasma glucose, physical inactivity, and alcohol use. These are the very areas, in fact, where most population/public health programs are currently focused. However, when it comes to public policy, laws, and spending money to try to solve the problems, we are woefully deficient in the US. There has been some success in regulation of smoking in public places although not without significant resistance from those who profit from tobacco, including the tobacco industry, tobacco retailers, and clubs and casinos; indeed the public smoking ban passed in my state of Kansas a few years ago is being threatened with repeal. Public interventions in the other areas have had much greater opposition (see New York City’s efforts to limit portion size of sugar-filled soft drinks) or non-existent.

What is popular is victim-blaming, telling people who are overweight, inactive, smokers, drinkers, and victims of diabetes or hypertension to “clean up their acts”, to stop, to lose weight, to adopt healthy habits. Of course, these would be good, and we see increasing numbers of individuals doing so. However, the success rate is much higher among groups with higher income and higher educational levels, which must mean something. It could be that they know that smoking, obesity, inactivity, drinking, drugs, and not taking medicine for diabetes and high blood pressure are bad for you, while poorer people don’t. That, however, is hard to imagine. It is more likely due to their greater level of resources to try to address these problems, social support for healthful behaviors (including jobs), and access to health care. In addition, the same interests that lobby against regulation of smoking, unhealthy foods and alcohol are heavily advertising these same substances in the least-advantaged communities.

The “social determinants of health” are at play here; not only access to health care, but safe communities, stable housing, education, and prospects for jobs – the very things that national and often state policymakers seem to be least willing to fund, and the areas that other OECD countries often do fund. As discussed by Bradley and Taylor  in their book and NY Times Op-ed “To fix health care, help the poor” and by me in my post from December 18, 2011, “To improve health the US must spend more on social services”, the US stands out among OECD countries in that the vast majority of its combined health and social services spending is on medical care. This helps explain both our decrease in YLL from treatable but essentially end-stage medical conditions and our increase in YLD and in risk factors for chronic disease, because, as Bob Bowman described so well in “Moving to Recovery By Design”, June 22, 2013,we do not treat the “upstream” circumstances of people’s lives that lead to “downstream” disability and death. Even the US Burden of Diseases Collaborators have left out discussion of the social issues, which is perhaps on purpose but did not escape Fineberg’s notice: “The most glaring omission in the assessment of risk factors, as the authors acknowledge, is the role of social factors such as income and inequality as a risk of premature death and disability.” It is, as he acknowledges, harder to measure, but that scarcely decreases its relevance.

It is not about the money. We have the money. It is, as I have said before, about the will. About the will of politicians, who are ideologically committed to the principle that the only ones who really deserve government assistance are the largest corporations and wealthiest individuals and have, as Charles Blow has said (“Resonance Resistant”, May 18, 2013), a gag reflex to the word “social”, but also the will of the American people who often seem to value high-cost, high-tech care at the end of life more than healthful nurturing of people at its beginning.

27^th in age-standardized death rate? 28^th in years of life lost? Come on! Where is that old American competitive spirit? We can do it. We know that. Now, we must do it! 

---

[1] US Burden of Disease Collaborators, “The state of US health 1990-2010”,  JAMA. 2013;():.  doi:10.1001/jama.2013.13805.  Published online July 10, 2013.

[2] Fineberg HV, “The State of health in the United States”, JAMA. 2013;():-. doi:10.1001/jama.2013.13809, published  online July 10, 2013.