Isn’t it time for the U.S. to follow the example of the state of Massachusetts and virtually every advanced nation on Earth and provide universal health care coverage for its citizens?
The Massachusetts Miracle
By
Jack E. Lohman
Of course health care is a mess, and for the same reason everything else is a mess: politics and greed. Health care is no longer a humanitarian service; it is a profit-making industry, and a very profitable one at that. Having just retired from after 35 years in the industry, I'd encourage you to break the crisis down to two questions.
1) Why is health care so costly in the first place?
2) What is the best and most humanitarian way to deliver it?
It is costly as hell because Congress has changed many of the rules at the behest of major contributors of campaign cash. More than $100 million per year from health care interests (hospitals, medical associations, HMOs, insurance and the pharmaceutical giants), all to make the for-profit system more profitable. They like to spin it as "market driven," but make no mistake, that means for-profit. They know it and you should too.
Why else would they allow hospitals to convert from non-profit to for-profit status? Or for hospitals to buy up physician practices and control their referral base and the testing patients receive? Or for physicians to build their own hospitals and drive up unnecessary patient testing to make them profitable? Or to allow physician offices to purchase expensive diagnostic systems for their offices and then use them as cash cows, making profits on every test they run? And the most recent biggie, creating a whole new privatized industry called Medicare Part D (for drug plan) that will shell out more than $780 billion to the drug industry over the next decade?
It's called FOLLOW THE MONEY, and the public is rightfully mad as hell. But until the flow of campaign cash is stopped, don't even think about fixing health care (or any other societal problem for that matter).
And with all of the profit in our "market-driven, for-profit system," why else would Canadian physicians not flock to America? They certainly cannot become multimillionaires under their own system.
The Canadian system is not perfect, and will surely go downhill as the for-profit interests in that country lobby their parliament to under-fund it even further, thus causing longer wait times and creating an outcry for privatization. But that outcry comes mostly from the special interests that stand to gain from a highly profitable industry, or from rightwing think tanks that get major funds from the health care industry to tout their message. I often wonder if those at the "institutes" of Fraser, Cato and Pacific Research have families that will need affordable health care in the future.
But even as it is, 90 percent of Canadians prefer their system over ours. Their life-expectancy is two years longer than ours, infant mortality is 35 percent lower than ours, administrative costs are 9 percent compared to our 30 percent, and their overall costs are 40 percent less than ours even though they cover 100 percent of their population compared to our 85 percent.
What's not to like about that?
With the U.S. ranked by the World Health Organization as 37th in the world, and the fact that the U.S. and South Africa are the only two industrialized countries in the world without universal health care, I'd say there is a hell of a lot to like in the Canadian system. More than 15 percent of our GDP goes into health cost compared to 10 percent of theirs, and our health care interests are scrambling for even more of it.
But we don't have to exactly mimic Canada. What we need is a Medicare-for-all system. Since going on Medicare I see the same doctors as always, go to the same hospital, but have a different insurance payer: a private administrator under contract to the government. This system should replace Medicaid and other state medical services to the poor, and it would reduce worker compensation costs by 40 percent since all injuries would be handled by Medicare.
And employers should not pay for it, the public should! Actually, we already pay for health care when companies add their medical costs to the price of their product and we pay at the cash register. So let's remove this burden from businesses and encourage more to keep their jobs in the U.S. They surely can't compete with product coming from countries with universal health care systems (and that's all of them).
Why else can we expect to lose 60,000 Ford and General Motors jobs in the U.S.? Ontario now makes more Big Three autos than does Detroit, all because their health care costs are $6,500 per employee in Michigan compared to $800 in Canada.
Let's eliminate the profits that are going to the 1,500 U.S. insurance companies, eliminate the fraud and overuse, and provide health care services to 100 percent of the people for the same dollars we spend covering 85 percent of the population.
Why have our business leaders not demanded a national, universal health care system like that in Canada? They clearly don't know any better. They are ideologues who think it is socialized medicine and it isn't.
But the major problem is our corrupt political system that has allowed this in the first place. Why has the American public not demanded full public funding of state and federal campaigns (which would cost $15 per taxpayer per year but would eliminate the more than $4,000 per year we taxpayers are charged to offset the government giveaways to the special interests who do fund the elections)?
Only then will politicians start voting for policies that are in the best interest of the public. Our health care system would be the first to benefit.
April 6, 2006
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Jack Lohman is a retired business owner who lives in Colgate. He is the founder of MoneyedPoliticians.net and the author of the book “Politicians: Owned and Operated by Corporate America.”
