Republican healthcare policies are pushing America closer to Third World life-expectancy levels

[CousinIT]

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-life-expectancy-20181025-story.html

Health outcome statistics are notably hard to parse, given all the factors that go into the health profile of a population or country. But they often can be boiled down to one convenient metric for how well a country serves the health needs of its people: life expectancy.

By that measure, the United States stinks, and according to a new projection of global longevity, by comparison with other developed and even some less-developed countries, over the next decade or so it’s going to get drastically worse.

The projection, from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, was published last week in the Lancet, a leading British medical journal. It was based on data from the Global Burden of Disease research project overseen by the World Health Organization, which tries to identify the most important diseases affecting health worldwide and project their course into the future.

59 countries including China were projected to surpass a life expectancy of 80 years.

. . .

Republican policy since the ACA’s enactment in 2010 has been aimed at stripping away the cost protections and access the law provided. Fourteen states, all Republican, continue to reject Medicaid expansion under the ACA; 20 red states, abetted by the Trump administration, have moved in federal court to get the ACA declared unconstitutional.

Trump on Wednesday signed a bill with modest provisions to address the opioid crisis, including stricter enforcement against illicit drug importation and improvements in Medicaid and Medicare coverage for opioid addiction. But in every other respect the administration is making things much worse. It’s encouraging states to impose work requirements and premiums for Medicaid, which plainly will narrow access to coverage for the most needful population, and it’s promoting junk health insurance plans that will be allowed to exclude people with pre-existing conditions, like opioid addiction.

Medicaid has been attacked by Republicans for causing the opioid crisis; that’s utterly untrue, but what is true is that it’s a key to solving the crisis — if it’s properly funded.

Republicans in Congress have had no answers for the maladies that afflict the U.S. healthcare system except various ideas for making it less serviceable. The harvest is visible in the decline in longevity seen over the last two or three years, and beckons us from over the horizon and into 2040.

[ck4829]

1. As long as the health insurance execs are making money, they don't care

That's what our "Health care" system is about folks.

[Ohiogal]

2. This is what you get

when you have for-profit health care. Only the rich will thrive.

Cynic that I am, I'm thinking that the oligarchs in this country probably wouldn't mind if more poor people would just die off already and save them the cost of funding social safety nets.