Looking Overseas Gives Us Reasons to Be Thankful for Obamacare

This Thanksgiving, a lot of Americans will be giving thanks for Obamacare.By the end of this month, HealthCare.gov will be able to handle 800,000 users per day, enough to enroll everyone who needs coverage by the end of the year. Meanwhile, the state-run exchanges are reporting "a November enrollment surge," precisely as the Obama administration predicted. (Massachusetts also experienced a late enrollment surge when they adopted an individual mandate in 2006.) Everyday, we hear new stories about Americans who are saving thousands of dollars on their insurance costs, including House Speaker John Boehner, whose new Obamacare insurance will cost pennies on the dollar of his six-figure income.And not a moment too soon. Earlier this month, the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund published the results of their latest survey of eleven industrialized countries, including the United States, where they asked people about their experiences with the health care system in the past year. Their findings are a sad reminder of just how bad the status quo is -- and why we demanded health reform in the first place.Many Americans don't go to the doctor when they're sick because they can't afford it. Many don't go to the pharmacy or take their medicine. Add it all up, and 37 percent of Americans had some sort of "cost-related access problem" in the past year.That kind of problem isn't nearly as common in the Netherlands, where it only affects 22 percent of the population. Or France, where the number drops to 18 percent. Or Canada, where it's 13 percent. Or the UK, where it's 4 percent.Fair enough, you might say. More people have more access, but they also have to wait in line longer, right? Not necessarily.In fact, in most countries, the majority of the population could see a doctor within a day of their request. The United States placed second-to-last in this category. A quarter of our population had to wait six days or more -- a little better than Canada, but far worse than Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the UK.But that's primary care. The United States is known for its specialists, where 76 percent of the population got an appointment in less than four weeks and only 6 percent had to wait two months or more. That's a heck of a lot better than Australia, where only 51 percent got an appointment in less than four weeks and 18 percent had to wait two months or more. Or Canada, where the numbers are 39 percent and 29 percent, respectively.But it's about the same as the Netherlands, where the numbers are 75 percent and 3 percent. And the UK, where they're 80 percent and 7 percent. And even Germany isn't far behind, at 72 percent and 10 percent.So it's a mixed bag, but we're certainly not in the lead.In most countries, it's a lot easier to get after-hours care than in the United States. Only 35 percent of American doctors have an arrangement to take care of their patients after the office is closed -- by far the lowest percentage of all the countries surveyed. In Canada, it's 46 percent. In France, it's 76 percent. In Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK, it's 90 percent or higher.And the doctors have a lot more problems in the United States, where the paperwork piles up. One in three -- 32 percent -- reported significant paperwork or payment problems in 2013, compared to 23 percent in France, 17 percent in Germany, 15 percent in Canada, and 4 percent in the UK.No wonder everyone else is happier with their health care than we are.Only 25 percent of Americans think their health system works well. In the other countries, that approval rating ranges from 40 percent in France to 63 percent in the UK.Whereas 27 percent of Americans think the health system needs to be completely rebuilt, that disapproval rating ranges from 12 percent in Norway to 4 percent in the UK.That's a lot of numbers, but they all tell the same story: The United States has the most complicated, most expensive, and most frustrating health care system in the industrialized world -- and none of that is due to Obamacare, most of which took effect after the survey.In fact, Obamacare is moving our system closer to our international counterparts. Based on these numbers, I'd say that's definitely something to be thankful for.==========An abbreviated version of this op-ed was published in Friday's South Florida Sun-Sentinel. This version was published in the Huffington Post.