This is your host Nat Towson, your listening to an American Power Extra, a bo...
with one of our experts, designed to go deeper into the energy, military, and geopolitical
“stories driving the news. If you're looking for more context, more history, and a better”
understanding of the forces shaping global events, you're in the right place. Take it away, Mr. Global. We built a health care system in this country on a beautiful and distinctly American idea that you are responsible for yourself. If you work hard, provide for your family, don't be a burden, you'll be taken care of. It's the same spirit that, you know, settled
frontier and built an economy, this idea of rugged individualism, stand on your own
“to feet. That's what I've always believed, and then we ran that philosophy head first into”
a disease, and the disease didn't care a hard work. Because here's the thing about health
that this sort of founding mythology never accounted for, it is the one arena of life where individual responsibility has no bearing on the outcome. It hits a wall, it cannot climb. You can eat right, exercise, never smoke a day in your life. Suddenly, a cell mutates, or a car runs a light. Maybe a gene you inherited decides
to switch it so fawn at the age of 50. Illness is not a character flaw. It's not a failure
“of grit, and yet we designed an entire system as if it were. As if the sick simply hadn't”
planned well enough. I didn't save enough money. I didn't pull hard enough on those famous bootstraps we hear about. We took the one problem that is fundamentally collective, because any of us can be struck down at any moment, and we handed each person a bill and said, this is on you, buddy. Let's walk through what that philosophy has actually purchased. Because if rugged individualism produced great healthcare, the numbers would defend it,
but instead, they do the complete opposite. In 2024, the United States spent over $14,000 per person on healthcare. The average across the wealthiest nations of the OECD, 6,000. We don't spend a little more. We spend more than double what our peers spend. By any measure of money, we are the most invested healthcare system in the history of the human race. What did our money buy us? What did we get for that? American life expectancy at its
recent peak reached 79 years. The OECD average is two years higher. We rank near the bottom of the entire developed world. The shortest lives among our peers. Let's think about that for a moment, because it's the single most damning fact in American public policy. We pay the most. We die the so-nest. Every other so-called rich country on Earth spends less lives longer. There is no way to arrange the data. There's no clever
caveat. None of it makes sense. It's the proof written in dollars and years of life. Our approach has failed on its own terms. So where does all the money go? If we don't live longer, this is where the individualist design reveals its deepest flaw. When you build
A system around millions of separate people, each negotiating their own care,...
by a different plan with a different rule, you create a monster, a monster made of paperwork.
“Every hospital needs armies of billing specialists to fight with every single insurance”
company. Every insurance company needs armies of people to deny claims. An unbelievable
share of our spending never touches the patient at all. It vanishes into overhead into
the friction of a fragmented and broken marketplace into profit margins for companies whose business model is quite literally collecting premiums, paying out as little as possible. Other nations pulled their risk, cut out the middle layer, but not us. We multiplied that
“bad boy. We didn't just fail to build a good collective system. We built the most expensive”
machine for avoiding one that has ever existed. And the people who pay for that are the families, real families. So let's talk about this human ledger, so to speak. Roughly 27
million Americans under 65 have no health insurance at all. And that number is rising again
by more than a million a year. 27 million people in the richest country on earth are one diagnosis away from complete financial ruin. And here's sort of the cruelty of this individualist promise. Even having insurance doesn't save you. Millions and millions more are grossly underinsured. They have a card in their wallet. They can't afford to use it because the
“deductible is a wall that they can't climb. That's how you get the defining American”
catastrophe that exists almost nowhere else on earth. The medical debt. 10s of millions of us carry it. Millions of people who did everything right. Millions of people who worked and paid, premiums and followed all the rules, and still got a bill that broke them. And no other wealthy nation that's getting sick routinely mean going bankrupt. Just us were the only ones that turned illness into a financial death sentence. And we did it
on purpose by insisting that each person carried a burden that was never meant to be carried
alone. In the consequences are not only financial, they're measured in bodies. When people can afford care, they skip it. They ration, insulin, they don't fill prescriptions. They wait. Hope the chest pain passes until it's the emergency room or the morgue. Study after study is the lack of coverage to preventable deaths. Americans dying not from some incurable disease but from a completely unaffordable disease. You see the gap between
what medicine can do and what a family can pay is where people die. And that gap is the direct and predictable product of a system that told them you're on your own. If you just look at the beginning and the end of life and the failure is the starkest American mothers die in childbirth, it rates that shame our peer nations a wealthy country with maternal
Mortality closer to the third world.
than babies in nations that spend half what we do. The most fundamental measure of whether
“society can protect its own, can a mother survive giving birth, can an infant survive”
that first year? And we're losing on both of those while spending more money than anyone
in history. Now here's what we need to understand because this is not an argument against
responsibility. That's ridiculous. Personal responsibility is a virtue. It's one I take a lot of pride in. Take care of yourself. Take care of your family. But responsibility only works when the outcome is actually within your control. You are responsible for locking your door.
“You're not responsible for stopping a hurricane. And illness and sickness for the most of us”
most of the time is the hurricane. It comes from outside. It doesn't check your bank balance
or your work ethic before it arrives. That's not a thing. We're demanding that individuals solve a loan a problem that is by nature shared. This isn't a philosophy of freedom. It's a philosophy of abandonment dressed up as freedom. Every other developed nation has figured this out generations ago. Now because they love their citizens more than we love ours or maybe
“they do. But because they did math. They did the math. They understood that health is the”
textbook case for pooling risk that a danger which can strike anyone is cheapest and most humanely handled by everyone together. They spread the cost across the whole society so that no single family gets crushed by this random cruelty of a diagnosis. And for that for that solution they get to live longer. They pay less and they're not bankrupted by a broken leg. They chose to look out for each other. We chose the myth of the self-made man when it comes to health care
and we're paying for it twice over not only in money but in years lived. That is like the great irony sitting at the center of American health care. The rugged individualism were so proud of that I, too, am proud of. I love rugged individualism. But the thing we think makes us strong doesn't apply to health care. It's the very thing that makes us sick, broke, and short lived. Our resistance to these sort of solutions, collective solutions didn't preserve anything for us.
It didn't preserve our freedom. It just broke up and fragmented our care which was fattened and bloated into big profit margins and left normal, ordinary working families to face the same storm all alone one at a time. Watching the water rise. We built a system that asked each person to solve by themselves. The one problem that human beings
have never once solved the loan. And the bill for that mistake. $14,000 a head in two years off of your
life. $27 million uninsured and a nation of people in medical debt is the most expensive proof in the world of a simple truth. There are some things that we can only survive
If we survive it together.
Folks, if you haven't had a chance, please check out the American Power Podcast.
“It's available on Apple, Spotify, anywhere. You can download a podcast. You can also see it”
on the Findout Media YouTube page. Other than that, please let me know your thoughts and comments
in the comments section below. I really appreciate you guys so much for all your support.
I've gotten and building this channel. It's been quite a journey for those of you that
watched me in the very early days. I hope I've gotten better. I hope I've gotten better.
“I've made some progress, I think. And I really appreciate you guys hanging with me and sticking around.”
This is not easy. I promise. You guys have a great weekend. Thanks.
