The Commonwealth fund recently took part in an international survey which compared the United States'healthcare system with those of the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Holland and Australia. All of these countries provide universal health care coverage (as do numerous others such as France and Sweden) and most pay a significantly lower proportion of their GDP on their medical care than the United States. Currently, 17.5% of US GDP funds health care and yet the country ranks below all of these other listed countries on the accessibility for care. This is something that social conservatives fail to grasp – that a country with supposedly the best healthcare available on the planet and the highest level of government spending is incapable of providing that care to all of its citizens. Many Obamacare opponents use skewed data to support claims that the Democrats’ new healthcare plan will ration standards of care and lead to longer waiting lists. They describe how patients in countries such as Britain and Canada have to wait several weeks or months for treatment but they use data based on minute samples. They refuse to admit that the waiting list for some 50 million Americans is, wait for it: forever due to lack of long term care insurance.
If you are an American without health care insurance, who is terminally ill and cannot afford to pay tens of thousands of dollars worth of medical treatment then you might as well live in a third world country. If you have a pre-existing condition that your medical insurance company is unaware of, you may be rejected for claiming insurance on your medical treatment – regardless of how life-threatening your health condition may be. This is the fundamental crisis that has plagued the American health care system for so many decades. Assuming Republicans don’t repeal the Democrats’ Obamacare plan in the future, one day Americans will realise that Obama’s health care plan was one of the greatest political achievements of 21st century America. Especially in the face of such overwhelming opposition from the right.
