Healthcare in a Backward Country

The backward country being the United States of America.  My own healthcare experiences, though not exactly crippling, have helped me realize how much our healthcare system is a big detriment to those of us living in "The Greatest Country in the World."

I am in a better position than a lot of people. I am working intermittently as a contractor for now, but I worked full-time for 25 years as an accountant and made a wage that put me in the top 20% or so of Americans. I have health insurance as a result of early retirement, although it is expensive and has a really high deductible ($3,000 just for me.)

Still, right now I find myself trying to balance my health needs versus the costs in a couple of important ways.  For my diabetes, I am trying to take as little insulin as possible, allowing my blood sugar readings to drift a little higher than my doctor would like (though still within American Diabetes Association guidelines), because insulin alone was costing me $20 per day.  I have it down to $10 per day, but I am taking some risk to do so.  I hope the risk is pretty small, but I cannot really be sure.  My mother died from diabetes, and I saw what it does to people; I really don't want to go down that road.

My father died from colon cancer, and that is the second risk.  Colon cancer is very treatable if it is caught early, and due to my family history, I have colonoscopies every few years -- a little more often than most people -- but I am a couple of months overdue for my latest one, because I know it will be expensive, and I don't want to spend that much money right now.  Not a huge deal for the moment, but still, I am balancing my medical needs against cost.

And it all seems just crazy to me.  Other countries -- almost all other relatively wealthy countries -- have found better solutions to the healthcare problem.  If I lived in Japan, Great Britain, France, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, or any number of other countries, I would just get the treatment I need without having to worry about cost.  Instead, I am trying to weigh treatment and prevention of the two diseases that killed each of my parents versus what I can afford.

It is easy enough to blame Republicans, and people who reflexively hate Obamacare but agree with its individual provisions, and certainly they deserve blame.  But I think the biggest obstacle to a better healthcare system in the US is American arrogance.  The smart thing to do would be to study the solutions other countries have tried, evaluate what works and what doesn't, and then build on their experiences to re-engineer our whole system.  But of course, The Greatest Country in the World doesn't have anything to learn from Canada or Germany.  God forbid we copy the French.  Better to just put the blinders on and pretend we're doing great, because hey, we're America.  We're the best.