America Was Set Up to Fail During the Pandemic
When the healthcare system is so broken, it should be no surprise that there was so much damage and death
The US healthcare system is horribly broken. Not only is it not working, it is failing us miserably.
America Fared the Worst During the Pandemic
As of May 11, 2023, the national COVID-19 death toll stands at about 1.1 million. The US has lost more people to COVID than any other country.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093256/novel-coronavirus-2019ncov-deaths-worldwide-by-country/
America’s Health Disadvantage
Americans spend more on healthcare per capita than any other country. In 2021, the US spent $4.3 trillion on healthcare which averages to about $12,900 per person and yet we have the worst health outcomes in the top 79 nations.
We have more deaths from disease and injury per 100,000 people than other countries.
Five out of six Americans (83%) will get heart disease or cancer in their lifetime. Heart disease is the leading killer of Americans, and the lifetime risk among healthy Americans remains dangerously high.
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK578535/figure/ch2.fig5/
Of all countries in 2020, the United States possessed the highest infant mortality rate at 5.4 deaths per 1000 live births. US maternal mortality in 2020 was over 3 times the rate in most of the other high-income countries, with almost 24 (23.8) maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births.
Since 2015, the United States has seen a historic decline in life expectancy. The US life expectancy was slightly above the global average of seventy-three years in 2020. And the US has the lowest life expectancy among peer countries.
American Doesn’t Have a Healthcare System, We Have a Sick-care System
In the sick-care system we simply treat the symptoms and not the underlying cause of illness. We wait for people to get sick and then we treat the symptoms of those illnesses with drugs.
Americans take more prescription drugs than other countries; we take 75% of the worlds drugs while only comprising about 5% of the world’s population. The problem is these drugs are not making people better or healthier. Every one of these drugs has serious and in some cases, fatal side effects. Therefore, people are taking drugs to counter the side effects of other prescription drugs.
And pharmaceutical products are now the third leading cause of death in the US.
Nine times more people will die annually from adverse medical events than will die from firearms.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the American medical system is in the top leading causes of death and injury in the US. Approximately 20% of Americans experience some form of medical malpractice in their lifetime. Nearly 18% of hospital patients suffer an injury during the course of their care. There are up to 40 wrong-site, wrong-side, wrong-patient, or wrong-procedure surgeries happening weekly in the US. A Johns Hopkins study analyzed medical death rate data over an eight-year period and concluded that medical errors accounted for over 250,000 deaths per year. National mortality statistics have been tabulated using billing codes, which don’t have a built-in way to recognize incidence rates of mortality due to medical care gone wrong.
“Incidence rates for deaths directly attributable to medical care gone awry haven’t been recognized in any standardized method for collecting national statistics,” says Martin Makary, M.D., M.P.H., professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and an authority on health reform.
Source: https://www.sidgilreath.com/learn/medical-malpractice-death-statistics.html
The US healthcare system is horribly broken. Not only is it not working, it is failing us miserably. In fact, it has become a major source of harm to Americans. A 2009 JAMA article stated that the benefit of our healthcare system does not outweigh the harm caused by the system.
On balance, the data remain imprecise, and the benefits that US health care currently deliver may not outweigh the aggregate health harm it imparts.
When something causes more harm than good, drastic changes need to be made. Given, all of this it is no wonder the US had such a poor outcome in terms of loss of life over the course of the pandemic.
It is well past time for dramatic reforms in the US healthcare system. But at the end of the day, your health is YOUR responsibility so take steps to ensure you set yourself up for success.
In a country where nobody questions the excessive use of electro-magnetic radiation the people began to die.... oh what a surprise.