The ACA vs Cow Manure: Are These Our Only Options?

Trump once said the AHCA was a “great bill.” He later called the Senate equivalent “mean.” All these bills are/were mean because they threaten(ed) to take health insurance from millions of Americans.

Today, I wanted to talk about the American health care System. This is a three-parter and this first part will be used to discuss the nuts and bolts of the Patient Care and Affordable Care Act (called the Affordable Care Act or ACA for short) as well as recent legislation. But before I can get into all that, I would like to talk about the standing of the U.S. health system compared to the rest of the world.

Our government spends more per capita than most other countries ($10,345) and is the only advanced economy to not have a universal health care system. In particular, it is particularly costly to give birth. Despite these costs, we do not have the best of incomes.

In March, Quartz published the results from a study it conducted to compare the American standard of living to other countries which were part of a 2016 report by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. Quartz based its report on the 17 goals defined by the United Nations in 2015, but only looked more closely at 11 of those goals, which included health. The study found that Americans had higher infant mortality rates and a lower life expectancy.

Americans have the lowest life expectancy among the OCED countries. On average, life expectancies fell from 78.9 years to 78.8 years from 2014-2015.

While a direct connection between mortality rates and a lack of health care may not be immediately found, there is a mortality gap between the rich and poor. Some of that has to be because the lack of funds to pay for life-saving procedures.

With that said, let’s talk about the ACA and the monstrosities that were being pushed through Congress.

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