WHY WE NEED HEALTHCARE REFORM
Eva is making great points in her comments about why we need Healthcare reform. Can you imagine that within a generation, healthcare costs could comprise 32% of GDP if there is no reform? This is exactly one of the important points President Obama is making, that is, status quo/ no action is not sustainable. And I agree wholeheartedly with Eva's statement: “To those who cry about government involvement, let me remind you -- we are the government!”
- Even though one dollar in every six generated by the world’s richest economy is spent on health—almost twice the average for rich countries—infant mortality, life expectancy and survival-rates for heart attacks are all worse than the OECD average.
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Meanwhile, because health insurance is so expensive, nearly 50m Americans, an obscene number in such a rich place, have none; those that are insured pay through the nose for their cover, and often find it bankruptingly inadequate if they get seriously ill or injured.
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Since half the population (most children, the very poor, the old, public-sector workers) get their health care via the government, the burden on the taxpayer is heavier than it needs to be, and is slowly but surely eating up federal and state budgets.
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Private insurance schemes are a huge problem for employers: the cost of health insurance helped bring down GM, and many smaller firms are giving up covering employees.
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Expensive premiums are depressing workers’ wages.
I do not agree, however, with Economist’s conclusion that Mr. Obama should just use “public option” as a threat, rather than implement it now. We shouldn’t not need to wait for another 10 years for triggers etc. for public health insurance, and a healthcare reform without it would be totally meaningless.
Canadian Socialized Health Care Nightmares... What Obama Has For Us
http://yedda.com/questions/Canadian_Socialized_Health_Care_1869107797311/
All is not well in Canada.
You maybe oversold on ObamaCare watchout
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Health Care in Canada from Dick Morris
In our new book, Catastrophe, we spell out exactly how the Obama health care proposals will lead to a Canadian style socialized medicine -- and we explain the consequences.
* A 16% higher cancer death rate in Canada
* An eight week wait for radiation therapy for cancer patients
* 42% of Canadians die of colon cancer vs. 31% in the US
* Cutbacks in diagnostic testing
* The best meds for chemo therapy are not available
* No way out of the system; you can't even pay for services yourself
Why is health care so bad north of the border? Because there are too few doctors to treat everybody and cost savings -- which slice medical incomes -- drive doctors out of the profession. When Obama calls for a 21% cut in Medicare fees to physicians and a $2500 cut in health costs per capita, that is exactly the kind of downward spiral in medical care quality he will bring to the United States. By making too few doctors cover too many patients, he will cut the quality of care to everybody.
As Obama's proposals make their way through Congress, it is vital that we all get up to speed on what is happening in Canada, so we can stop it from happening here. It is through word of mouth that we need to spread the information to undermine public support for the changes Obama would bring.
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Part 1
March 13th, 2009
What’s Wrong With Canada’s Healthcare System?
by Dr. Val
This post is a continuation of my discussion of foreign healthcare systems, and what the US can learn from them… I’ve summarized one particularly provocative and outspoken Canadian’s opinion below:
Is Canada’s healthcare system a political monopoly?
Dr. Brian Crowley is the Founder and President of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He describes the Canadian healthcare system this way:
Canadian Medicare operates in an unregulated, tax-financed, pay-as-you-go model. Our provincial governments are our monopoly provider. They not only pay for necessary care, but they also govern, administer, and evaluate the services that they themselves provide. They define what we call “medically necessary services” and pay for 99% of all physician services. They also forbid the use of private insurance for medically necessary services. They set the budgets for nominally private healthcare institutions. They appoint the majority of their board members and have explicit power to override management decisions.
Under these circumstances, no hospital or hospital administrator can be expected to take any responsibility or initiative because decisions will always be second-guessed by those in political power.
Before the advent of competition in our telephone industry, dissatisfied customers faced the massive indifference of a bureaucracy that took their business for granted, despite some theoretically powerful regulatory agencies. Administrators of the Canadian healthcare system likewise suffer no direct consequences for poor customer service. They aren’t even answerable to a regulatory agency. Accountability is a vague political concept which cannot be enforced in any meaningful way. Like all monopolists, Canada’s healthcare authorities abuse their positions of power.
Dr. Crowley argued that the provincial governments have no desire to measure how many people are waiting for health services, how long they’ve been waiting, or how many people leave Canada to get treatment south of the border. (He claims that the US is Canada’s secret safety valve.) Apparently the province of Ontario contracted with New York State for cancer care for their patients when wait times became politically untenable.
A couple of years ago, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the healthcare system violates Quebec’s charter of rights because it collects taxes, promises healthcare in return, forbids competing suppliers and then often doesn’t deliver the care. The justices summarized the situation this way: “A place in a queue is not healthcare.”
Canada-wide average wait times for surgery is 17.8 weeks, though in Saskatchewan, wait times for hip replacements are as long as a year and a half. That’s after a physician has ordered the surgery. Getting to see a physician in the first place is very difficult. Statistics Canada reports that 1/5 of Canadians do not have a family doctor.
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Dana,
Let's not start crying wolf! First of all, what President Obama is saying is that if we leave the health-care system the way it is, all of us will end up spending over a third of our income on health care in the not-so-distant future. Can you afford that? I certainly can’t and neither can any of my family, friends, or acquaintances. The public option is necessary to reign in the insurance companies that are making incredible amount of profit even at a time when we all need to tighten our belts. Soon most of us will not be able to afford to get even half-way descent care!
And who pays for the care of people without insurance? You and I. And please don't tell me that all of the people (who go to the emergency room because they cannot afford to go to a doctor) are illegal immigrants. I know people living in New Hampshire who have recently lost their jobs and cannot afford private insurance. They have one of two choices: they can go to the emergency room of a local hospital if they become ill or they can hope that through some miracle they will be cured. Would you like to be in their shoes?
You bring up the Canadian system of health care as the prime example of what a single-payer plan would look like. However, you should be looking at all the industrialized countries of the world to see if there is a better way to provide health care to our citizens. President Obama has said over and over again that he has no intention of modeling our health-care system after any one country’s . He has stated that the public option would be just one choice for people to make amongst a smorgasbord of health insurance possibilities. What he wants to do is to make health-care affordable to all of us by making sure that insurance providers charge fair and equitable rates (if they do that, they have nothing to fear from the public option); that health-care providers make decisions based on what their patients need and not on what insurance company dictate; that health-care providers talk to one-another so that tests, x-rays, etc. would not be duplicated; to electrify health records so that they could be easily shared between health-care providers no matter where we happen to be; to ensure that people with pre-existing conditions would be able to get insurance; and to make sure that all Americans can get health insurance whether they can afford to pay for it or not.
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Well, I think that the choice of having health insurance is an important one. Although some people will choose to not have it, not really because they don't want it but it's because it is so expensive. The way they are going about pushing it on people I feel is unnecessary.
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