Here at Playboy, you might envision us spending our days in individual office hot tubs, sipping martinis and shuffling through layouts. At times the reality is much more mundane, such as when our health-insurance forms are due. Keeping a long story short, it’s a confusing system, involving pre-tax dollars, deductibles and out-of-pocket limits, that seems to require a Nobel-worthy mathematical model to fully grasp.
Such is the state of healthcare in America. As expensive as it is confusing, rates across the country continue to increase in double digits every year, while the rate of inflation hovers around 3 percent. But you get what you pay for, right? Well according to a landmark World Health Organization study among 191 nations, America rates first in healthcare expenditures while in overall performance, it is 37th. Two things come to mind, one practical, another ideological: First, where is the money going? (To the insurance and pharmaceutical company execs, we’re guessing.) Then, does it matter how wealthy a country is if it can’t adequately take care of its own?
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Comments on this entry:
In my opinion, the government is the problem. Health care should be completely privatized. The standard objection from the "liberal" left is that this would allow the wealthy to have better health care than the poor. But they always will anyway, and, by implication, that's an argument against a free market in anything. Would we tolerate that much paperwork to buy groceries so that no one would go hungry?