Is our Health Care System based on Health or Something Else?

According to Andrew Weil, MD, our system of health care is based on "sickness care," in this country. I would have to say that I agree with him.  Last week, I talked about the infant mortality rate in the US in comparison to the rest of the world.  Now, it appears that we have an even worse standing when it comes to same-day infant death rates...we rank number 68 in the world.

“The United States has the highest first-day death rate in the industrialized world. An estimated 11,300 newborn babies die each year in the United States on the day they are born. This is 50 percent more first-day deaths than all other industrialized countries combined.”

The article goes on to speculate as to why this is:  we have a higher teenage pregnancy rate than other countries, we have a high pre-term death rate, we have poverty and racism, and, my favorite, it's our politics and culture.  Really?  And, there are no politics, culture, poverty, racism, teenagers getting pregnant and preemie problems in, oh, Egypt or Peru or any of the other 66 countries that do better than we in this category? 

I can think of a few other ideas that might be affecting our health care system.  One would be that we don't all have equal access to basic health care.  This doesn't just apply to the "usual" groups that we think about...the poor or the young or the disenfranchised.  This also applies to those with insurance:  ridiculously high deductibles for office visits,  requirements by insurance companies that each visit be "approved", mountains of paperwork just to get a simple lab test done,  uncooperative insurance adjusters,  claim denials and pre-certifications that appear to be designed to delay or discourage care and, best of all, lack of choice as to what kind of care and/or doctors patients may choose.

 If there is a failure of our health care system (I would advocate there is by looking at the statistics), then, whom do we hold responsible?  Unfortunately, I don't see any changes coming anytime, soon.  We have allowed ourselves to accept the "sickness model" for health care that Dr. Weil talks about.  We take pills for every ailment under the sun, only to suffer the unintended consequences that foreign chemicals eventually cause. We choose to adopt the reactive,  "if I have no symptoms, I'm okay," approach to health instead of a proactive, preventative approach.  I guess that might come from the, "better living through chemistry," model of German chemical companies of the 19th century, which were the forerunners of modern pharmaceuticals.  Until the model changes, the results will stay the same.  Remember Albert Einstein's quote: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result."
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