We have read with interest the debate surrounding opioid use in the USA and related deaths. We also welcomed the different perspectives of Gerard A Kalkman and colleagues,1 concluding that universal health care and addiction care in Europe contributes greatly to preventing an opioid epidemic of US proportions. If we agree with many points, we respectfully disagree that this prevention is homogeneously helping to prevent such a crisis development. The authors mentioned only the opioid crisis i...
A lawsuit to overturn the Affordable Care Act may be floundering after Supreme Court justices questioned why the law should be dismantled. Susan Jaffe reports from Washington, DC.
Alison Galvani and colleagues1 robustly modelled the effect of the Medicare for All Act on US national health expenditures and outcomes. Spending on hospital care and physician or clinical services accounts for 53% of total spending. Their model assumes that Medicare rates are uniformly 22% lower than are private-payer rates and that, by switching all fees to Medicare rates, overall reimbursements will be 6% lower for hospitals and 7% lower for physicians.
President Donald Trump pledges to replace the Affordable Care Act while his Democratic opponent Joe Biden offers detailed proposals to improve it. Susan Jaffe reports from Washington, DC.
The USA's rural hospitals are a lifeline for the communities that they serve, as evidenced by the catastrophic effects of their closures. Subsequent to the closure of a rural hospital, mortality rises by 5·9% among residents of the service area.1
The USA stands alone as the only high-income country not to provide health care as a human right, leaving almost 80 million of its citizens without adequate insurance.1–3 In a 2020 study, we found that securing quality health care for the entire country would save 68 000 lives and 1·73 million life-years annually.4
Marta López-Fraga and Beatriz Domínguez-Gil make their point about our Health Policy on the ethics of the Global Kidney Exchange (GKE) programme1 by asking us to imagine that Alyson, an Ohio farmer, is willing to donate a kidney to her daughter but unable to afford the surgery. Medicare pays for kidney transplantation surgery in the USA, even for people younger than 65 years, so there is no way in which GKE could prevent Alyson's daughter from receiving a kidney from her mother. Kidney transp...
We commend the Editors for bringing to readers’ attention the “unfortunate distinction” of Canada's otherwise laudable publicly funded Medicare.1 The effects of this distinction on health, such as poor adherence, poor health outcomes, and avoidable hospital admissions, are well documented.2,3
Many Chileans think that their country has lost its way. Massive protests highlight the need for a political reform to prioritise universal health care. The uncritical worship of the most extreme version of the free market by the Pinochet dictatorship led to the dismantling of the social contract and privatisation of the social security system. A system of personal retirement accounts was mandatory for new workers whereas the current workforce could opt out from the existing government-manage...