Stats about Healthcare

• The United States spends six times more per capita on the administration of the health care system than its peer Western European nations.¹⁴
  
• Health care spending is 4.3 times the amount spent on national defense.³
  
• Although nearly 46 million Americans are uninsured, the United States spends more on health care than other industrialized nations, and those countries provide health insurance to all their citizens.³
  
• Health care spending accounted for
  
  • 17 percent of the GDP in America
    
  • 10.9 percent of the in Switzerland,
    
  • 10.7 percent in Germany,
    
  • 9.7 percent in Canada
    
  • 9.5 percent in France
    
• According to a recent report, the United States has $480 billion in excess spending each year in comparison to Western European nations that have universal health insurance coverage. The costs are mainly associated with excess administrative costs and poorer quality of care.¹⁴
  
• National surveys show that the primary reason people are uninsured is the high cost of health insurance coverage.²
  
• A recent study by Harvard University researchers found that the average out-of-pocket medical debt for those who filed for bankruptcy was $12,000.
  
• The study noted that 68 percent of those who filed for bankruptcy had health insurance.
  
• 50 percent of all bankruptcy filings were partly the result of medical expenses.⁹ 
  
• Every 30 seconds in the United States someone files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious health problem.
  
• A new survey shows that more than 25 percent said that housing problems resulted from medical debt, including the inability to make rent or mortgage payments and the development of bad credit ratings.¹⁰
  
• About 1.5 million families lose their homes to foreclosure every year due to unaffordable medical costs. ¹¹
  

 Sources:

1. Keehan, S. et al. “Health Spending Projections Through 2017, Health Affairs Web Exclusive W146: 21 February 2008.
   
2. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Employee Health Benefits: 2008 Annual Survey. September 2008.
   
3. California Health Care Foundation. Health Care Costs 101 — 2005. 02 March 2005.
   
4. Pear, R., “U.S. Health Care Spending Reaches All-Time High: 15% of GDP.” The New York Times, 9 January 2004, 3.
   
5. McKinsey and Company. The McKinsey Quarterly Chart Focus Newsletter, “Will Health Benefit Costs Eclipse Profits,” September, 2004.
   
6. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Employee Health Benefits: 2008 Annual Survey. September 2008.
   
7. Agency for Heathcare Research and Quality. Out-of-Pocket Expenditures on Health Care and Insurance Premiums Among the Non-elderly Population, 2003, March 2006.
   
8. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The Uninsured: A Primer, Key Facts About Americans without Health Insurance. 2004. 10 November 2004http://www.kff.org/uninsured/
   
9. Himmelstein, D, E. Warren, D. Thorne, and S. Woolhander, “Illness and Injury as Contributors to Bankruptcy, ” Health Affairs Web Exclusive W5-63, 02 February , 2005.
   
10. The Access Project. Home Sick: How Medical Debt Undermines Housing Security. Boston, MA, November 2005.
    
11. Robertson, C.T., et al. “Get Sick, Get Out: The Medical Causes of Home Mortgage Foreclosures,” Health Matrix, 2008
    
12. Selzer and Company Inc. Department of Public Health 2005 Survey of Iowa Consumers, September 2005.
    
13. Fidelity Investments, Press Release, 06 March 2006.
    
14. McKinsey Global Institute. Accounting for the Cost in the United States. January 2007
    

http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml

Early Shepard Fairey

…then there’s the truly unfortunate photo op that Thomas Dewey had with life magazine, casting into doubt that his work with the press was as deft as previously thought.

 

This was forever immortalized by his campaign poster that was subsequently tagged on the governor’s residence in three colored paint.

Obama Follow up

My podcast

What if instead of sitting through some 1950’s services each Sunday adjacent to the Whitehouse where the pastor shares common platitudes on Sundays the pres. would go to some church where (as Vonnegut said he preferred in Travels with Charlie) the preacher describes hell as a place where the devil heats it up with a white hot poker.  What if instead of hearing things with which he or she agrees every Sunday someone is appointed to talk in convincing fashion and tell the president to get right or get left? I like the model of convicting sermons, especially for others. How offensive is it when the church says that god should, or would, damn a secular society? If you are a Baptist who believes in a fallen world and a select group cry for salvation and are given what they do not have coming and the rest will burn in a literal not figurative hell, well that is pretty tough “damning” language from any perspective. If you are a Calvinist its worse not better. Now you are going to hell unless you won the God lottery and he chose you and the balance are going to a literal not a figurative hell, and so on. Golly these are some damning perspectives that might make a person sit up and say, “er, uh…” Yet we have presidents who do not know about grocery-store scanners, or the fact that gas prices will be @ $4.00 a gallon this summer. On that, last week our current president was asked about soaring gas prices and he said he did not know that they were heading toward four-a-gallon. This is because they do not but their own groceries nor fill up their own tanks of course. But they do not hear real information in a hundred ways right? The insular life that a president leads is not as necessary as it is convenient. So I say that having the president hearing some fire and brimstone damnation services is a step in the right direction. To mix a metaphor: Open the doors of the cocoon and let some fresh air in.

Obama goes to church

Right: My podcast

Here’s what I know about Preachers. They say lots of stuff. They said stuff for 15 minutes a week in my childhood’s traditional church. Most of that was white-bread, tame, feel-good Biblical rhetoric about helping your neighbor that could have been delivered as well by Garrison Kiellor or a candidate for office. I slept through them mostly.

Then on the other end of the spectrum I have been in gospel services for many years, where the preacher spent two hours, three times a week shouting about how lousy the devil was, how lousy some politician was, or, how lousy I was. Both types of service are fair game because these preachers are paid to say what they think and feel. Their sermons are aimed at the smart, the dumb, every race and age in the room and so on. As for me, I am wide awake.

Of course this is all recorded now and if you talk that much about what you really think and feel you are gonna sound like a jerk part of the time. But, hell, you’re preacher so preach. Mix it up a little. Wake ‘em up. It is as though sermons were supposed to be challenging, interesting, dynamic and exciting.

Pastors all over the country criticize the government. They criticize me. They criticize the human condition. That’s their job. Conservative and liberal churches all seem to agree that government is going to hell in a hand basket. That’s why we live in America, so we can criticize it. Furthermore, separation of church and state was not designed to save the state, but to save the church. What did this guy say that is so out of bounds for all these sensitive ears?

It seems this preacher was not criticized for what he said, but for how he said it.

Here’s what I know about folks who go to church. Some are there to learn religion? Some are there to find community. Some go to get close to god. Some go because they love to sing. A number seem to be there just by habit. Folks go to services to be challenged. They go to be comforted. They go to share casseroles. All kinds of stuff.

But after 40 years in church I can tell

A.     You are not required to attend.

B.      There is no entrance exam to get in.

You don’t have to prove that you are good enough and smart enough, or religious enough. You don’t have to be a Christian to go to a Christian church. How cool is that? If your pastor is a great person, well hallelujah! If your pastor is a loser—and I have had some—tough darts. You signed up and this is your family. If your pastor is a nut, well he/she is your nut.

So Obama said that he does not agree with some of these messages. Well, yeah. We are not required to agree at church. We are not required to listen. We are not required remain awake. But if we are challenged or offended or moved or even awakened maybe it was a worthwhile sermon. We are allowed to hear things that challenge us, and with which we disagree without taking our football and going home.

If Obama wants to go to church where they keep you up, where the pastor is outspoken, where there is shouting that’s his business. Should he stop attending church when he is challenged or offended? Every time? This is what allows the country to be un-churched: the ability to allow our offenses to drive us away from the pews to sip coffee and listen to NPR Sunday mornings. But going to church is risky business. You are surrounded by all kinds of folks who are there for all kinds of reasons. You will listen to folks in your adopted community say things that you may love or hate. But this is your community. Yours till your offended and you walk away. Until then the casserole is pretty good.