Our Healthcare Finance System Is Our Leading Cause of Death
By Gary Puckrein
Every year, a silent killer threatens more American lives than cigarette smoking and opioid addiction combined. It lurks behind premature deaths attributed to cardiovascular disease, cancer, Covid-19, and obesity.
The Grim Reaper here is a healthcare finance system perversely designed to limit access to quality care.
This finance regime outright denies and rations medical interventions on the basis of poverty, race, ethnicity and gender -- then covers its tracks by offering no accounting of the health impact of its rules and procedures. At its core, our system is a machine dedicated to mitigating financial risk rather than patient risk of debilitating illness and premature death. It's long past time to correct this misbegotten set of priorities and biases.
When Americans visit the doctor or the emergency room, they probably do so in the expectation that our healthcare system is designed to help them enjoy high-quality long lives. That's wrong. Much of the system is designed to elevate their risk of dying young.
Consider that in order for Congress to vote on a change in healthcare law, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) must "score" it for its hit on the federal Treasury. CBO is blithely indifferent to whether the change might lead to longer and better lives.
But CBO isn't the villain here. It's simply doing the job Congress assigned it. Nor is it unique. Myriad federal agencies evaluate healthcare regulations and programs in areas from prescription drug coverage to performance-based hospital payments. In all cases, they do essentially the same thing: they manage financial risk by elevating patient risk.
These healthcare financing policies mean that 14,000 people die of hepatitis C every year because we won't pay to cure them, which we know how to do. The average life expectancy for a sickle cell patient is 42-47 years because we have failed to invest in treatments. We're on the verge of introducing early-detection screening that can check for fifty types of cancer with one blood draw. Yet it will take an act of Congress and a maze of regulations before it becomes available to the American public.
Meanwhile, the FDA has approved a treatment that could slow or even halt the progress of Alzheimer's in millions of Americans -- and Medicare has decided they can't have it because it would cost the government too much money.
Something tells me they won't be able to keep it away from people with the coin to pay the $28,000 a year it costs.
This inequity neatly summarizes the deliberate discard of the lives of black, brown and poor people as a result of our approach to healthcare financing. This problem has persisted for decades in the form of disproportionate infant and maternal mortalities, diabetes amputation, poor cancer survival, and the failure to ensure that minority Medicare beneficiaries have access to flu and pneumococcal vaccines.
We have reached an inflection point. We are mastering the science that will take us to the limits of human longevity. But we can't get there without a healthcare finance system in which high-quality and long life is the top priority.
Gary A. Puckrein is president and chief executive officer of the National Minority Quality Forum. This piece originally ran in InsideSources.
