A snapshot of the United States’ healthcare financials
Fact checked by Shannon Sparks
Three-fourths of countries worldwide explicitly protect their citizens’ right to health in their constitutions. The United States is not one of them.
Not only is healthcare not considered a human right in the U.S., but insurance companies and their shareholders profit off of denying people care. This creates an unsustainable stew of people either skipping necessary medical care or paying high prices out-of-pocket, and physicians spending their limited time battling with insurance companies to fight for treatments their patients need.
The statistics make little sense. Americans spend more on healthcare than any other country, yet tens of thousands lose their lives every year due to lack of care. Patients can easily fall into bankruptcy from medical debt, and the system isn’t working for doctors either.
“What’s burning out healthcare workers is less the grueling conditions we practice under, and more our dwindling faith in the systems for which we work. What has been identified as occupational burnout is a symptom of a deeper collapse,” wrote Chicago psychoanalyst Eric Reinhart, MD, in a 2023 New York Times op-ed.
The American Medical Association (AMA) projects a shortage of 124,000 physicians in the U.S. within the next decade. Of physicians overall, 2 in 5 shared that they intended to leave practice within five years. Another survey found that one-third of nearly 20,000 academic physicians had moderate or greater intention to leave the field. In both cases, the physicians cited lack of professional fulfillment, moral injury, and burnout.
“Burnout manifests in individuals, but it originates in systems,” AMA President Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, MD, said during a 2023 event at City Club of Chicago.
Many physicians are finding solutions in joining together to advocate for universal healthcare, housing and social programs, and community health worker programs. Reinhart wrote in his op-ed, “To be able to build the systems we need, we must face an unpleasant truth: Our healthcare institutions as they exist today are part of the problem rather than the solution.”
Fifteen years ago this past March, then-President Barack Obama took a step toward making healthcare more accessible to all Americans when he signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law. The law made huge strides in Americans’ healthcare coverage by eliminating lifetime benefit limits and pre-existing condition discrimination.
It also enabled people to stay on their parents’ health insurance policies until age 26.
And even though the ACA has come under threat from Republican lawmakers every year since its birth, Republican President Theodore Roosevelt was actually the first to propose universal healthcare in the early 1900s. Another Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, tried again to make the proposal reality in the U.S. As the fight continues today, the numbers show that American citizens are footing the bill — in dollars and declining health outcomes.
