STUDY SLAMS U.S. HEALTH SYSTEM, SAYS 40% OF COVID DEATHS AVOIDABLE

A team assembled by the respected medical journal The Lancet to study the Trump administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has concluded that 40% of all US COVID deaths could have been avoided.

Reporting for Truthout, Mike Ludwig said the US health care system values profit over human life and this has been the case since administration of President Ronald Reagan. If the United States had death rates on par with other wealthy nations such as Canada and Japan, there would have been 40 percent fewer deaths attributed to COVID-19 last year.

In 2018 alone, an estimated 461,000 fewer people would have died if the U.S. was as healthy as France or Germany.

The life expectancy in the U.S. began falling behind peers such as the United Kingdom, Germany and France when Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, according to Kevin Grumbach, a professor of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and co-author of the report.

“That is the turning point where health started falling in the United States compared to the other G7 nations,” Grumbach said in an interview. “We totally shifted to conservative and neoliberal policies, and that corresponds with the deteriorating health in the country relative to other nations.”

Reagan instated policies that reduced the government’s role in health care and education and accelerated the concentration of wealth among the upper classes. Since then, life expectancy has dropped 3.4 years behind other wealthy countries and remains even lower among Black people and Native Americans.

The report found that, before the pandemic, rates of midlife mortality among Black people and Native Americans were 42 and 59 percent higher, respectively, than for white people. People of color are more likely to die from COVID than white people, and the mortality gap between Black and white people has grown by 50 percent during the pandemic.

“The disastrous, bungled response to the pandemic made clear how existing, longstanding racial inequities simply have not been addressed,” said Mary T. Bassett, director of the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University and a member of the commission, in a statement. Reagan’s neoliberal political philosophy stuck around under both Democratic and Republican administrations and created conditions for the rise of Trump.

The report links health to trade liberalization that led to the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, weakened unions and left many parts of the country to struggle economically. According to the report, Trump exploited anger among white voters over their “deteriorating life prospects,” and stoked racism and nativism to win the 2016 election.

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