Coronavirus: A killer blow to US healthcare?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 22 July 2020
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The coronavirus pandemic is stretching the US healthcare system to breaking point, with tens of millions of people losing their employment-related coverage. One such person is Susan, a breast cancer survivor who has had to avoid vital check-ups after being made redundant as a bartender in New York. And there are many more like her. Kaiser Family Foundation Data Scientist Cynthia Cox explains how difficult it is to know how many people are actually without healthcare right now. Dr Adam Gaffney, a pulmonary and critical care doctor and instructor at Harvard Medical School says the insurance-led model already was in need of a drastic overhaul, while Mary Grealy of the Healthcare Leadership Council counters that the system does still work and offers greater choice to the consumer. And LaRay Brown, who leads the One Brooklyn Health System, describes how the pandemic is having a devastating effect on hospitals’ finances. Will the US health system stand up to the strain of Covid-19, and its economic disruption?
(Picture credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:05.7 | Today, America's privatized healthcare system. Is it going to hold up against the COVID crisis? |
| 0:11.9 | It's pushing the system sort of to its limits, exposing the disparities in healthcare coverage and access that are all the more apparent when a respiratory viral epidemic |
| 0:23.5 | is ripping through the country. |
| 0:25.1 | Yes, unemployment has left citizens, uninsured, and a hole in hospitals' finances. |
| 0:31.0 | Is it time to switch to socialize medicine? |
| 0:34.0 | Well, I disagree with that. |
| 0:35.7 | We have seen many polls in this country, and well over |
| 0:39.8 | 70% of American people want to keep their private employer-based insurance. That's all to |
| 0:47.0 | come in Business Daily from the BBC. COVID had just been hitting the states for maybe a week, I guess, |
| 0:59.6 | and we got an email saying that we were closing down. |
| 1:03.6 | We kind of thought that there would be parameters put in place, |
| 1:07.2 | but I didn't expect it to just go away. |
| 1:10.6 | That's Susan Kent, based in New York, remembering the day back in March, when she learned |
| 1:16.0 | she'd lost her job. She was working as a bartender. |
| 1:19.0 | I've been through it before. I had lost my income at 9-11, and then again in 2008 when the market |
| 1:25.5 | crashed. So I just didn't go into any sort of panic. It was just, |
| 1:31.6 | okay, well, here's where we are. I look into my bank accounts to see how much money I had at |
| 1:36.8 | the time, which wasn't a whole lot. I had about a month saved up. I was like, okay, well, I have |
| 1:43.3 | a month to figure this out and go and get a job. |
| 1:47.8 | But then the reality hit. It wasn't just her income, but her health insurance that had gone. |
| 1:53.5 | This was really serious. My health insurance at the time was around $800 a month. And I had cancer last year. And I was just right as the |
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