U.S. Health Care System Needs to be Euthanized. It’s Making Us Sick, Poor.
November 5, 2025
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When author Thom Hartmann tried to explain to a Danish journalist that millions of American families go bankrupt trying to pay deductibles, co-pays, and health care expenses associated with cancer, heart disease, or a serious accident, the Dane didn’t understand.
Peter Mogensen said no one in Denmark experiences financial distress or loses their home because of a family illness or injury.
“Over half of all bankruptcies in America are because people can’t afford these expenses, and their insurance companies don’t cover all their expenses or they don’t have health insurance,” Hartmann wrote in his 2009 book “Threshold.”
Mogensen responded by saying, “Here in Denmark, we could not imagine living like that.”
Here in the United States, the federal government is shut down largely because MAGAs don’t care if health care premiums double or triple for millions of Americans.
In Denmark, middle-class taxpayers pay 45% to 53% in taxes. The most wealthy pay 60% and the poorest pay 30%. For this — among other benefits such as free higher education and being taken care of in retirement — all aspects of Danish health care are free. If you need a treatment that isn’t available in the country, for instance, the government will pay to fly you to another country where specialized health care is available — ironically, such as the United States, where health care is unaffordable for millions — and cover all expenses related to the foreign care.
In the United States, middle-class taxpayers pay an average tax rate — federal, state, and local combined — of about 26%. The top 1% pays nearly 35% and the lowest 20% pays 17%.
Now, I’m not suggesting we copy the Danish approach, but we sure as heck could do a lot better. The U.S. health care system as constructed is criminal.
An estimated 26 million Americans, or 8% of the population, lacked health insurance in 2023. While the United States still lags behind countries, such as Denmark, that have universal coverage, the nation’s uninsured rate represents a significant change from the years prior to the Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare,” when nearly twice as many people — 49 million, or 16% of the population — lacked health coverage.
MAGAs want to kill Obamacare and replace it with nothing, for the simple reason they enjoy causing pain and suffering. They also believe billionaires are the only ones who deserve taxpayer money. Quid pro quo, you know.
The average annual health insurance premiums in 2024 were $8,951 for single coverage and $25,572 for family coverage. The average single coverage premium increased 6% last year while the average family premium increased 7%. The average family premium has increased 24% since 2019 and 52% since 2014.
The median U.S. household income was $83,730 in 2024 and $82,690 in 2023. The median per capita income in 2024 was $45,140 and $43,313 in 2023. Worker pay isn’t keeping up with health insurance costs — or any other costs, for that matter.
Compare those numbers with the country’s richie richest. The collective wealth of the top 10 U.S. billionaires soared by nearly $700 billion in the past year, according to a new report from Oxfam America on the nation’s growing wealth divide.
While the 43-page report warns that MAGA policies risk driving U.S. inequality to new heights, it also notes that both Democratic and Republican administrations have exacerbated growing inequality.
Using Federal Reserve data from 1989 to 2022, researchers also calculated that the top 1% of households gained 100 times more wealth than the median household and 987 times the wealth of a household at the bottom 20th percentile of income during that time.
This unjust situation translates to a gain of $8.4 million per household for the top 1%, compared with $83,000 for the average household during that 33-year span, according to the report.
In the meantime, 40% of the population, including nearly 50% of children, are considered low-income, with family earnings that are less than 200% of the national poverty line.
Inequality is a policy choice, and we decades ago — I point to 1981, when President Reagan took office — chose to lavish the wealthy with taxpayer money by slashing social safety nets. Our super-wealthy society could easily afford to protect the marginalized and voiceless, including Mother Nature, but our collective selfishness and ignorance has no rival.
As for the broken U.S. health care system, it works well for the wealthy, or for some people who might live in Denmark.
Despite a significant percentage of the population living without access to health care — with the exception of visits to overcrowded, understaffed emergency departments, which are few and far between in rural America — the United States spends significantly more on health care per person than other wealthy countries. In 2023, the United States spent about $13,000 per person and $14,885 in 2024, compared to the average of about $7,400 in comparable nations.
U.S. health care costs are driven largely by the consolidation of hospitals and a lack of competition and inefficiencies and administrative waste derived from the system’s complexity. My brother-in-law (emergency department) and sister-in-law (clinic) are both doctors and they have a difficult time, both professionally and personally, navigating a health care system controlled by insurance companies. CEOs, not health care professionals, dictate care.
The United States spends about $1,000 per person on administrative costs — about five times more than the average of other wealthy countries. This grand spent pushing papers is also about what we spend on long-term health care. Sweden, for instance, spends 22 times the amount on long-term health care as it does on administrative costs.
Despite higher health care spending, our health outcomes aren’t any better than those in other wealthy countries. In fact, the United States actually performs worse in several common health metrics, including life expectancy, infant mortality, and unmanaged diabetes.
That’s criminal.
Note: Rhode Island has some of the highest commercial health care premiums paid by families and employers in the country. Findings from a Rhode Island Business Group on Health report found that between 2012 and 2022 health insurance premium costs in the state increased from 23% to 28% of median household income, leading to the state having the 13th-most expensive premiums in the country. The percentage of Rhode Island respondents with a premium of more than $500 increased from 31% in 2012 to 41% in 2024, according to the 2025 annual report Health Care Spending and Quality in Rhode Island. As employers have tried to “buy down” premium increases by increasing employee cost sharing, deductible amounts have exploded. In 2012, only 6% of respondents had a deductible of more than $4,000, but in 2024 that number had jumped to 33%.
In Massachusetts, according to the state’s Health Policy Commission, health care spending is growing faster than inflation, labor costs, and income, exacerbating affordability challenges for residents.
In Connecticut, growing health care costs are leaving residents behind, according to the state’s Office of Health Strategy.
Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.
Oh boy, now you’ve got me started… our health care system is literally eating itself. Every additional person employed to shuffle paperwork also needs health insurance. We’ll end up like the planet in Douglas Adams’ book Restaurant at the End of the Universe where the entire economy ended up devoted to shoe stores:
Many years ago, this was a thriving, happy planet – people, cities, shops, a normal world. Except that on the high streets of these cities there were slightly more shoe shops than one might have thought necessary. And slowly, insidiously, the numbers of these shoe shops were increasing. It’s a well known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the more shoes they had to make and the worse and more unwearable they became. And the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is the termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result – collapse, ruin and famine. Most of the population died out.
Also, I place a curse on those who create “patient portals”. I have at least 8, some for doctors I haven’t visited in years, none is comprehensive. If one more doctor offers to sign me up for a portal, I’ll scream. Recently, it took half a day and visits to 5 portals, most of whose passwords I’d forgotten, to organize my bloodwork on an Excel sheet so I could pass it to yet another doctor whose own portal didn’t talk to those others. And no one in the practices ever looks at them anyway. I cannot say with certainty that I have EVER had a message sent to my provider via a portal read by someone in the practice without my specifically asking them to on the phone. Here’s what we need…portals should follow the PATIENT, not the doctor. You subscribe to your portal of choice or perhaps it comes with your insurance, and when you visit a doctor they scan a QR code you give them and that subscribed THEM to YOUR portal! Everybody looks at the same stuff all in one place!
And where does the money go besides database developers and office paperwork pushers and insurance company claims deniers and their CEOs? Prescription drug companies. Have you watched any TV lately? Take the evening news for example. If 50% of the ads are for eczema drugs, then our insurance premiums paid for 50% of everything you see…Tom Brokaw’s salary, the flashy set, the heat at 30 Rock, the salary of the CEO, the profit for the shareholders, etc., etc. A huge percentage of EVERYTHING on TV (hundreds of billions) is being paid for out of our healthcare money. Is that what we signed up for?
My wife and I are in our seventies and in very good health. We have Medicare for our health insurance but let’s not pretend that it is free or even a good deal. The problem is Plan B. We spend $12000 per year for it. Then we have a supplemental plan for what Medicare A and B do not cover at $6000 per year. Finally, there is Plan D that we spend $3600 per year for. The total is over $20,000 per year. The problem is risk adjusting for our age and the high taxes for cashing in IRAs that government wants us to pay back. So, make no mistake about it. Medicare is fleecing us. We are all, of all ages, in a health insurance collapse. All of us need universal health insurance.
There is a very simple solution: Trump should reverse the executive order that exempts Congress from having to use our health care system so they can have their own. Then watch how fast they replace the failed Obamacare with a plan that works for everybody.