Thursday, January 20, 2022
PMT: The Tragedy of Profit-Driven Healthcare
Yesterday, the New York Times posted this moving video about the nursing "shortage" in the United States, and I really urge you to watch it. The video allows nurses to describe the way that profit-driven hospitals short-staff their nurses to maximize profits, with a direct cost in death to patients. There is no shortage of nurses--there are more nurses in the US than ever before-- there is a shortage of staffing created by our health care model. The pandemic did not create this problem, but did make it worse.
As a nation, we are terrible at fixing things that work to the benefit of businesses that can pay for lobbyists and ad campaigns-- and no one has more money for that than pharma and other medical-related businesses.
The video urges legislation that mandates nurse-patient ratios in hospitals, but the problem is broader and deeper that that. We do need to re-think the way we provide health care in this country, because right now we are paying a lot for not-so-great outcomes. Data shows that "The U.S. spends more on health care as a share of the economy — nearly
twice as much as the average OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) country — yet has the lowest life
expectancy and highest suicide rates among the 11 nations." The 10 other countries studied were Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
So we pay twice as much, and get the worst outcomes. We just are not doing this right.
