By: Ana Y.
Chimney smoke from a factor. Photo by Veeterzy, via Unsplash.
With 16.9% of the United States’ GDP spent on healthcare, the highest rate of healthcare spending in the world, one would expect the country has one of the greatest healthcare systems on the planet (Abrams and Tikkanen, 2019). However, without a universal healthcare system and a severe amount of financial flaws within the system in place, the country currently holds a ranking of 27th in the world for healthcare, which is on the lower end for a country consisting of such immense wealth (Bendix, 2018).
On the other hand, the United States suffers from the worst wealth gap out of any of the G7 nations, with a Gini coefficient of 0.434 as of 2017, according to the US Census Bureau and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. For instance, this number is evident when considering that families in the second-lowest fifth of the country’s income tiers experienced a 39% loss in income from 2007 to 2016, whereas the top one-fifth saw an increase of 13% (Pew Research Center, 2020). As people suffer from income loss, essential expenses, such as health insurance, begin to become unessential when having food on the table or a place to spend the night is a priority for survival.
According to the United States Census Bureau, there are around 27.5 million uninsured Americans, meaning that 8.5% of the population is inadequately prepared for an unexpected emergency (2019). Over time, the number of uninsured individuals within the country has increased in correlation with the wealth gap. If inequities such as the wealth gap continue to grow, then we can expect that the percentage of the GDP spent on healthcare will only increase, without many systemic improvements.
To put this in perspective: 78% of Americans work paycheck to paycheck, meaning that if they aren’t paid for a month or lose their job, they are also unlikely to be able to afford healthcare without insurance (CareerBuilder, 2017). Without a universal healthcare system in place, people without insurance can be forced to pay around $7,500 for something as simple as a broken leg, which can be detrimental when considering that people without insurance often don’t have it because it is too expensive when they have to make ends meet (HealthCare.gov).
So, how can we expect someone who cannot afford to pay an extra few hundred dollars a month in private health insurance will be able to pay over a thousand dollars in fees for generally necessitated healthcare such as doctor’s checkups or dentist appointments? The answer is we can’t. And if we can’t expect people will be able to afford them, then that means that they won’t be able to get these appointments done at all. But if people are skipping out on these annual checkups, they are more likely to have clinical diseases and illnesses go undiagnosed, correlating to a greater number of early deaths.
As climate change worsens over time due to the lack of action taken to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases being released to the atmosphere, we can expect to see a greater amount of uninsured people disproportionately affected. With a greater amount of particulates and gases circulating in the atmosphere, air pollution, and the increased number of allergens will lead to intensified asthma attacks, greater rates of heart attacks, and allergic reactions (CDC, 2020). Along with this, global warming leads to more severe weather events such as hurricanes which can lead to unexpected injuries and deaths, which can take a mental toll on the people who survive.
As we are already anticipating the arrival of more severe impacts of climate change on health within the United States, it can be expected that the government would be interested in systemic reform within the healthcare system, making it more accessible or possibly even universal. Essentially, a reform would actually be cheaper for the country rather than relying on the current system because it would avoid late diagnoses on health conditions that end up costing the country when people are unable to afford care, or die early because they didn’t receive initial help. A problem with this, however, that doesn’t lie within failed finances or the debt of the country, is the pre-existing social stigmas and quarrels between the Democrats and Republicans, through something known as moral hazard.
Moral hazard, as defined by Oxford Languages, is the “lack of incentive to guard against risk where one is protected from its consequences.” In effect, the term is often applied to situations such as universal healthcare, in which it is argued that if people have universal healthcare, they will abuse the system and cause an overhaul of payments, which would increase taxes. But moral hazard has a more inherent bias in it than a conceptual application because it cannot easily be applied to healthcare when introducing universal healthcare would mean people can receive treatment before a health condition becomes extremely expensive, and not that people will start going to the hospital as often as they would to the grocery store. Without addressing these biases between political groups in the United States, there will continue to not be any reform within the system, which means that the disproportionate number of uninsured people will be much more likely to die as a result of climate change related issues, heightening the impact that climate change has on all aspects of life.
Discussion Questions:
How can we argue that moral hazard cannot be applied to universal healthcare?
Is it possible for the country to invest in basic universal healthcare with the introduction of private healthcare as a supplement?
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