Americans Lack Bang for Health Care Buck

ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 17, 2004

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - Americans might pay a lot for health care, but in return they feel like $1 million bucks. Not quite. A new study published by a pair of Oregon researchers found that Americans are paying more and feeling worse than people in Europe and Canada.

"We spend much more than any industrialized country on a per capita basis and we get much less in return," said report co-author Dr. Bentson McFarland of Oregon Health & Science University. "It's a terrible waste of resources and, of course, it's inequitable."
McFarland and Portland State University's Mark Kaplan, the lead author, found that Americans spent $3,939 per capita on health care in 1997, compared with Canadians who spent $2,187 per capita and residents of European Union nations, who spent $1,773 per capita.

The United States also outpaced other nations in health care spending as a percentage of gross domestic product: It spends 13 percent of its GDP on health care, compared with 9 percent in Canada and 8 percent in the European Union.

At the same time, Americans were far more likely to describe their own health as "fair" or "poor" than were Canadians and Europeans across nearly all age groups. Starting at age 30, Americans had a significantly higher prevalence of poor self-rated health than their Canadian and European counterparts; the disparity between health care spending and self-rated health increased with age.

The report, published in the June edition of the Journal of Epidemiology & Public Health, follows Cover the Uninsured Week, a campaign to secure health coverage for every American.

An estimated 44 million Americans, including 8.5 million children and at least 20 million working Americans, have no health insurance, according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The Oregon study is the first to conduct an international comparison of self-reported health status, which McFarland said is a powerful predictor of life expectancy.
McFarland said his research shows the United States has an inequitable health system, one in which poor people get "terrible or no health care."

Another problem, he said, is that Americans spend their money foolishly.

"We spend too many dollars on expensive procedures that have little or no impact on overall health, and spend too few of our precious dollars on preventive, public health-oriented interventions," he said.

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