The Covid-19 pandemic continues to change our landscape daily. And it is drawing attention to cracks in the U.S. healthcare system.
The United States spends more on health care than any other country in the world, but we are the only OECD country without universal medical coverage. Nearly 28 million (27.9 million) Americans lacked health insurance in 2018.
In New Mexico, the average hospital visit is about three-thousand dollars ($2842)per day. Currently, the average hospital stay of Covid-19 patient is around 10 days, or $30 thousand dollars. But that bill could much higher depending on the services needed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjNL1ycwUaU&feature=youtu.be
Meantime, New Mexico’s median household income is around $48 thousand, far lower than the national median of $63 thousand. And in 2018, almost 200,000 New Mexico residents were uninsured.
Those uninsured patients lead to higher insurance rates, as medical providers try to make up for unpaid bills. Derrick Cuenca is CEO of MountainView Regional Medical Center in Las Cruces. He says access to healthcare and who pays the bill are critical issues for the country to address.
“Changing tides in terms of who pays for healthcare and how it’s paid for is a question I think our country is going through as a society and I think it’s a timely discussion but how it really impacts us as running health systems on a day to day basis, I mean we need to address access, and sustainability, and then of course keep at the forefront quality healthcare,” Cuenca said.
And access is an issue. We have fewer hospital beds per capita than other advanced democracies (2.4 in the Unites States compared to 12.2 in South Korea), which makes us particularly vulnerable to a pandemic. In New Mexico alone, the beds per capita average is even lower at 1.8. That means there are less than two hospital beds for every thousand people.
It’s numbers like those that have officials like Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham worried. “The only way for us to stop the spread of this virus is for New Mexicans to stop interacting with each other. New Mexicans must be crystal-clear on this point: Right now, every time you leave your house, you are putting yourself, your family and your community at risk. Only by distancing from one another, by remaining home except for essential or emergency travel, can we limit the spread of this virus to the point that it does not overwhelm New Mexico,” Gov. Lujan Grisham said.
Looking at data sets provided by the Harvard Global Health Institute and ProPublica, we can see the stark reality for our region. According to the Harvard data, in the El Paso region, intensive care units would be especially overwhelmed and require additional capacity. Without potential coronavirus patients, there are only 51 available beds on average in ICU’s, which is 9.6 times less than what is needed to care for all severe cases of the virus.
While a single-payer system would not have stopped a virus like Covid-19 from happening in the first place, it has pushed the narrative about healthcare further along. As Emma Schwartz, CEO of the Medical Center of the Americas Foundation told KRWG a few weeks ago at a local healthcare summit, that conversation is an important one.
“I’ve studied health policy a lot in my career, comprehensive health policy reform hardly ever happens. It’s usually something very piecemeal and I think that’s why our healthcare system is so broken. Because no one sits down and takes the time to develop a comprehensive solution that’s well formulated and devoid of politics and so I’m just excited that healthcare continues to be a high priority issue, it means it will get attention, it means hopefully whomever wins the next election will bring together working groups who are very knowledgeable about this and we can figure out something that works for our country,” Schwartz said.
As the Covid-19 pandemic has shown, the stakes are high for the United States. Healthcare was a key issue in the 2018 election, and it is likely to continue to be part of the dialogue as the country moves toward the November Presidential and Congressional races.