U.S. health care and the NHS: Is the NHS under appreciated?

Today, I watched ‘Sicko', a 2006 documentary film on the U.S. health system by U.S. filmmaker Michael Moore. And let me tell you, I felt sick after only twenty minutes.

Over 45 million Americans are without health insurance. For Americans, who don't have the cushion of the NHS as Brits do, health insurance is the only feasible way to obtain health care. However, many Americans are denied health care, sometimes urgent, for many scrupulous reasons, even when they HAVE insurance.

The film highlighted cases of people being denied insurance for being too thin or obese. In addition, the list of conditions that results in an insurance application being declined, should the applicant have any of them, is huge. One such condition is heart disease, the leading cause of death in the US in 2006¹. According to the film, 18,000 Americans die every year due to lack of health insurance.

People's health should be considered with more importance by health maintenance organisations (HMOs - the providers of health insurance). For a company, in a country whose percentage of GDP spent on healthcare is the highest in the world, to deny insurance to people more at risk of developing conditions because it would cost them more should be illegal in my opinion. What is more important to the success of a country than its workforce, and its workforce's health and human rights?

President Nixon campaigned for HMOs, which were to become the bane of working class Americans until 2010 when Barack Obama's healthcare bill passed through US Congress. His bill, fiercely opposed by some (although I cannot think why), includes a ban on denying healthcare to people with pre-existing conditions and will bring healthcare to about 95% of Americans², a huge improvement on things at present.

All in all, I think our own NHS, although not perfect, is very under appreciated. We are very lucky that emergency and most non-urgent healthcare is provided for free, even to non-British citizens that are in the country, and the elderly, under-16s and various other categories of patients get free prescription medication and sometimes dental and other services. I'm not saying American healthcare is terrible but the policies used to be rather unfair. Change, though, is slowly happening.

My sister was born with a heart condition called transposition of the great arteries (TGA), where the aorta and pulmonary artery were in the wrong places. Consequently, she was constantly blue-faced and short of breath and had open-heart surgery to correct the fault in 1999. The superb work of the surgeons that operated on her meant she's still alive today and I shudder to think what may have happened had we been living in the USA. I sure am glad to be British. Are you?

References:

1. Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lcod.htm, accessed 24/08/10

2. The White House, http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/health-care, accessed 24/08/10