The United States “health care” system is a national disgrace. Two changes in the current “Privatized For Profit” mess would guarantee a fair and just system of health care for everyone from womb to tomb.
First…insurance companies must be totally excluded from the health care system. Insurance companies must not be allowed to insure people capitalizing on health problems to reap enormous profits. Insurance companies must be restricted exclusively to insuring property, not people.
The United States “health care” system is a national disgrace. Two changes in the current “Privatized For Profit” mess would guarantee a fair and just system of health care for everyone from womb to tomb.
First…insurance companies must be totally excluded from the health care system. Insurance companies must not be allowed to insure people capitalizing on health problems to reap enormous profits. Insurance companies must be restricted exclusively to insuring property, not people.
Second…pharmaceutical companies must be nationalized. No more obscene profits for Big Pharma.
Some of the obvious advantages to this plan include the following:
1. Health care would be available to everyone not just the wealthy, the politicians and people fortunate enough to have insurance.
2. People would not lose their homes and be forced into bankruptcy because they are unable to pay exorbitant costs of catastrophic long-term illness or injury.
3. Corporations would lose a major bargaining chip in their efforts to bust unions by manipulating and controlling health benefits.
4. Veterans would receive medical care in their own communities rather than traveling long distances to veterans’ facilities. Soldiers would no longer be stockpiled away from friends and family in privatized hell holes like Walter Reed Hospital.
5. Politicians would no longer be owned and operated by insurance companies and Big Pharma.
The argument against this proposal, of course, is that such a plan smacks of socialism. Bush used that excuse recently when he chose to veto medical coverage for poor children.
My response to that charge is that the U.S. already has socialism for the rich in the form of tax cuts and write-offs, subsidies, corporate bailouts and other taxpayer-funded programs to fatten the hogs feeding at the public trough. Capitalism with its “dog-eat-dog” credo is for the masses who should not ask what the government can do for them but what can they do for the rich.
Sue Bastian, Bend
This article appears in Jan 10-16, 2008.
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Who pays for this grand plan???
Maybe the same people who already pay for the existing health care system. Me and you. Or did you think it was free?
I know slogans are easy, but all insurance companys do is ‘deny claims, and collect premiums’. Does anyone really think that a ‘national universal provider’ will be any different?? Right now there is choice, if you have money. With ‘universal’ there will be no choice, and you’ll still have a paper-pusher deciding who lives and dies.
Drugs are even a bigger issue, our block-busters drugs come from the desire to win the lottery, take away that incentive, and we’ll soon be back to witch-doctors.
I agree, its obvious that we spend the most, and get the worst results. I know in drugs, sales-reps can often make $500k/yr, a surgeon $300k/yr; but without 1,000s of pharma sales-reps the doc’s would never know about the drugs.
Insurance companys are the gate keepers, replacing them with a ‘social-security admin’ will be a nightmare. If this were a simple problem hilly-pooh would have fixed it back in 1992.
People will once again die of natural cause in their 60’s and 70’s, get over it, western medicine is a technology of the rich. Given the fact that the average human life is worth only a fraction of what high-tech visits can cost medicine in the future will be rationed.
Even now if Senator hillyPooh gets sick, she gets to go to the best doctor money can buy for free. Me & You will never have that option. In medical some animals are more equal than others. It’s always been that way. I suspect its just political rhetoric to believe that Pol’s can deliver something for nothing to all.
We need affordable healthcare, but society also has to put a cap on cost. You can keep a comatose patient alive forever with modern technology. Who decides who lives? Who dies? Just look at the VA & Social-Security, they’re a nightmare for the sick; your ‘universal health’ will be no different.
Probably the old greek model is the best, vouchers, see a local doctor. Get in line for the hospital.
western med is big biz, to suggest that we should ‘get big biz out of med’, is a silly statement.
It’s costs billions to develop drugs today, largely because of FDA hoops.
Only the big-boyz can play. The pols will always be controlled by the money. Perhaps what you should advocate is ‘take the money out of medicine’.
Ok, fine, but then we would have no doc’, drugs, … nothing even in africa, if you really want to deal with a local village elder, you can see a witch-doctor.
Before the 1920’s there was no BIG-PHARMA, there was only local doc’s, and local medicines. Post 1920’s big-pharma bought the pol’s and created itself. The doc’s are limited by the AMA, prior to the 1920’s everyone was basically un-licensed. ….
In order to go back to the pre-corporate medicine model, prior to the 1920’s, you would have to go back to everyone having access to cocaine, opium, … barbers as doc’s, … certainly people survived under that model, and weren’t economically wiped out in illness. Big Medicine came like the model-t of henry-ford, men realized by scale they could make millions, and billions. Today you can make a car in your garage, but its better to just buy one. Same for medicine, you can become your own doctor, you can use ‘vetrinarian drugs’, …
Going back is difficult. Look at the Marijuana debate. If we the ‘people’ don’t have access to medicine ‘cheap’, then there will be no ‘self-medical’, this is the most important thing big-biz did is make us go to the pharmacy, and big hospital, people used to get their own drugs, and have baby’s at home, …
It’s been predicted for years, that things will return, as nobody will soon be able to afford corporate-medicine.
A report out yesterday stated that the ‘health care’ industry in the US topped $2 trillion for the first time. The rate of cost inflation still exceeds trice the rate of inflation–down from four times the rate of inflation a few years ago. But is the government administered, universal coverage so many advocate the answer?
I invite anyone to google ‘medicare fraud Florida’ to get a glimpse of what we can expect when the elected reps finally succumb to special interest pressures from the public and private sectors. It will be a system designed to pay–not control costs and administer care. The current private insurance system is the obverse. I tried to work for big blue in California about two decades ago–the insurance model is delay and deny(not necessarily in that order). That maximizes profits.
The government model will be to justify its existence–create a bureaucracy that moves slowly to justify increases in size and budget.
Codify everything as much as possible to eliminate any judgment at all and create a ‘system’ to point at and fall back on when things go wrong, bad decisions are made, or inaction reigns. (The recent local barbershop pole fiasco is a microscopic example of how government really performs.)
Create a system that is so large, complex and confusing that no one can understand it, and rather than abandon it, amend, amend, and amend.(Current tax codes anyone?)
Make it a matter of law so it becomes a legal and political juggernaut that is so vast, vests the reputations and interests of politicians, lobbyists, and public interest groups who can’t admit making a mistake, and becomes a political football in a game no one can win while those it is supposed to help wallow along in the status quo of denial. (‘No Child Left Behind’ anyone?)
We have BIG Government, BIG Medicine, BIG Pharma, BIG Insurance, and BIG Problems…
Now, if we could get someone with a good BIG Idea…
Get big business out of health care? Health care IS big business! Remove big business, and you have no health care. Remove big Pharmacy, you have no drugs.
Approximately 2000 Doctors a year migrate here from the British Isles. Why? Big business. They can make a lot more money here than at home in a socialised system that doesn’t pay that well. That is one of the reasons you have to wait six months there to get a tooth pulled. People are pulling their own teeth at home there. Seriously.
Capitalism works better than communism, agreed? Why?
HUMAN GREED. That is where Karl Marx blew it. The most common human attribute is greed. You remove the possibility of greed, you remove incentive. You remove incentive, you remove innovation, production and invention.
When you take the big bucks out of health care, the whole system goes into the toilet. Insurance companies are already a form of socialism. The risk and expense is spread out over all who contribute, with management skimming the top. With Big Government, you would have at least a 50% lost cost factor. Insurance companies don’t retain 50% of the take. If they did, another insurance company would do it cheaper, and siphon off the first companies business.
We need to solve health care in the private sector, period.
You missed a few. Our military policy. Scary evanglist movement. No imigration policy. Diminishing acess to formal education. Madison Avenue mentality. Pharmecutical industry. Lack of conscriptive military obligation for both sexes. Income and property tax structure. Disengaged population. Environment ignorance.
Your concern is neither at the top or bottom of the list. I think our current military policy is the biggest disgrace but I am a guy and a vet.
“Capitalism works better than communism, agreed? Why? HUMAN GREED. That is where Karl Marx blew it.”
Agreed; Marx had a naive view of human nature. He thought capitalism made people greedy, when in fact people created capitalism BECAUSE they are greedy.
We can’t change human nature, but a society governed by greed and nothing else is not the sort of place where I and most other people would want to live. Government needs to mitigate the effects of unrestrained capitalism. Conservatives are big on presenting false, simplistic choices — either we have unrestrained capitalism or we have communism. There is another way — in fact, many other ways.
Incidentally the “socialist” health care systems in Canada, Britain, France and other developed countries work quite well for most people. Better than ours, in fact — look at the data. We spend more on health care and get less for it in terms of positive results than any other developed country.
And the administrative overhead for our biggest government health care program, Medicare, is substantially LOWER than for private insurance programs — maybe because Medicare doesn’t have CEOs being paid tens of millions of dollars a year, a huge advertising budget and plush offices in skyscrapers.
The costs of Medicare have to include fraud from the billing mills that are able to operate with little fear of detection. The most CONSERVATIVE estimates put fraud at 10% of the total–and in some areas three of every ten dollars is estimated to be lost to fraud.
So fraud accounts for $40 billion annually, and goes up from there. Expanding the program–as Congress has done–without expanding the funding for fraud detection and enforcement–means these costs are only going to go up.
HBM: When you have to wait six months to get an infected tooth pulled, as in the UK…the system doesn’t work…no matter your left wing spin.
Let me ask you this, H. if you get cancer…are you going to the UK or Cuba looking for a cure?
I rest my case.
Actually, Oh Really, there are now large hotels being built next to hospitals in India, Korea, and, if you can believe it, Dubai to accomodate “medical refugees” from America and the U.K. for diseases like cancer, but primarily for complicated surgeries like heart and brain. Our health care problems are not Republican or Democrat – it’s the gridlock big pharm has on both parties. We’ll see what Hillary does when she gets elected. She’s this countries best hope.
Insurance is the most vile form of usury: paying interest ‘against the possibility’ that something ‘may’ happen. Mandatory health insurance, such as is popularly proposed by the (sic) presidential candidates, is a classic example, like Les Schwab and Oregon’s (late) mandatory studded tire law, of a monopoly baring it’s teat to the so-called ‘representatives’ of the people, who then suck it.
“Let me ask you this, H. if you get cancer…are you going to the UK or Cuba looking for a cure?”
Fortunately I have private insurance (which costs a small fortune) so I would be able to get treatment here. But if I didn’t have insurance I’d probably stand a better chance of having my cancer detected and adequately treated in the UK. (I don’t know enough about the Cuban health care system to comment on that.)
There’s no question that the United States has first-rate medical care if you can afford it. The Bentley is a first-rate car if you can afford it — but how many can?
Those of you who keep insisting that the American health care “system” is superior to those of other countries are simply in denial.
Okay, I found those WHO ratings of health care systems that O’Really sets such store by. Here are the countries that rank ahead of the US:
1 France (yeah, the cheese-eaters)
2 Italy
3 San Marino
4 Andorra
5 Malta
6 Singapore
7 Spain
8 Oman
9 Austria
10 Japan
11 Norway
12 Portugal
13 Monaco
14 Greece
15 Iceland
16 Luxembourg
17 Netherlands
18 United Kingdom
19 Ireland
20 Switzerland
21 Belgium
22 Colombia
23 Sweden
24 Cyprus
25 Germany
26 Saudi Arabia
27 United Arab Emirates
28 Israel
29 Morocco
30 Canada
31 Finland
32 Australia
33 Chile
34 Denmark
35 Dominica
36 Costa Rica
OTOH we’re two ranks above Cuba, and we kick the crap outta Uzbekistan. LOL!
(I’m sure O’Really will now decide that the World Health Organization “hates AMURRICA!”)
O’Really: “One would do well to remember that folks like Michael Moore and his left wing lunatic fringe propaganda film “Sicko,” (and our own local HBM) are blinded by their innate hatred of all things American …”
Yeah, I knew the usual asinine drool about “you hate AMURRICA!” would appear pretty soon. It’s the inevitable last resort of right-wingers when facts and logic fail them (which is pretty much always).
Yep, I hate America. Hate every damn thing about it. That’s why I’ve lived here for 61 years.
I wasn’t able to find the WHO study you cited (got a link?) but I did find this on Wikipedia: “The World Health Organization’s ratings of health care system performance among 191 member nations, published in 2000, ranked Canada 30th and the U.S. 37th, and the overall health of Canadians 35th and Americans 72nd.”
So — according to an agency that you yourself apparently deem credible, because you cited it — while the Canadian system’s performance isn’t perfect, it’s still better than the US system’s.
Now take another swig of the Kool-Aid and whine some more about how all them dirty libruls “hate AMURRICA!”
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) Canadians have the third most expensive health care in the world. However, it is 30th in efficiency and 18th in access.
The wait for a minor operation like carpal tunnel or hernia repair averages 9-12 months. The wait for total joint replacement or a cardiac valve is 14-18 months.
Half of the elective operating rooms must close for 8 weeks each year to conserve money. When those 8 week closures occur is up to the individual hospital.
Patient hospital care is a liability to the hospital, as each patient accepted eats away at the yearly allowed budget, instead of a source of revenue as in the US.
The government limits how many patients each doctor can see, and bill for, each day.
One would do well to remember that folks like Michael Moore and his left wing lunatic fringe propaganda film “Sicko,” (and our own local HBM) are blinded by their innate hatred of all things American…. and what they spout, “ain’t necessasarily soooo…”