John Abramson is a clinical instructor of primary care at Harvard Medical School. He began his careerin Appalachia, serving in the National Health Service Corps. In 1982 he became a family physician in Hamilton, Massachusetts, and practiced there for 20 years. He was selected by his peers three times as one of the best family doctors in the state. After researching his book, Overdosed America, he says health care in the United States is becoming less effective than in other industrialized countries while becoming much more expensive.
What’s the evidence for your thinking that Americans aren’t getting better health care for all their spending? A:
In 2000 Barbara Starfield, University Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University, wrote an article in The Journal of the American Medical Association showing that the health of Americans ranks second to last among 13 wealthy industrialized countries. And in 2001, the World Health Organization looked at the 23 countries that spend the most for health care. The United States spends by far the most in that group: roughly $6,000 annually per capita, which is twice the average of the other countries. But we have nearly the lowest healthy life expectancy, that is, total life expectancy minus the number of years of illness. Only the Czech Republic ranks lower.
