Adrianna McIntyre: Can you start by summarizing the core message in your book — what is the "paradox" in American health care, and how do you start to unravel it?
Lauren Taylor: The paradox that we outline is one that a lot of readers will be familiar with: that the United States has very high health-care costs, and in many cases middling — and sometimes lousy — health outcomes when you look at certain metrics. These are metrics — like infant mortality and life expectancy — where, when you look across developed nations, we're really at or near the bottom.
People cited this paradox before our book, and tried to explain it in any number of different ways. That included rationales like, "Well, U.S. health outcomes are bad because too few people have insurance" or "because prices are just high."
What our book tries to do is offer another reason that hasn't been talked about much in health policy: maybe "health spending" isn't telling us the whole story. Maybe we need to look at a broader summary of what resources nation puts in to support population health.
To do this, we included social services spending in our study, which captures things like housing, food assistance, and job training. The ratio of health to social-service spending was more predictive of several outcomes than health spending alone. This led us to suggest that social-service spending — and, more broadly, attention to the social determinants of health — could be a missing piece in the health reform discourse.
The giant problem American health care ignores - Vox
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