• Public health care option needed Public health care option needed I read Mr. John Love’s long letter titled “Fix health care system” (Letters, June 21) and found it unpersuasive. His prescription of more of the same of what got
• Public health care option needed
Public health care option needed
I read Mr. John Love’s long letter titled “Fix health care system” (Letters, June 21) and found it unpersuasive. His prescription of more of the same of what got us into this mess is just not good enough anymore. We need real change in the American health care system and cannot let the naysayers divide us and just kick the problem down the road another generation like they did in the early 1990s.
Mr. Love commits a number of rhetorical sins in his argument. First and foremost, he uses the old trick of fighting a straw man by attacking the idea of a single-payer system for America when no such system is being proposed. Our president has made it clear that his plan will leave existing plans in place and at most people may have an option to join a publicly run plan. This is nothing like a single payer.
Others on the conservative side will sometimes argue that a government option will be poorly run and unacceptable to most and then argue that a government option will best any free market alternative due to cost savings. I guess free market competition isn’t so robust when it can’t compete with a government system that no one will be happy with. Perhaps the real fear is that a government option will be readily accepted and well liked like the socialist, government single-payer system that covers people over age 65 called Medicare.
Mr. Love also resorts to the myth of American exceptionalism stating that we have the finest health care system in the world. While we certainly have many of the world’s best hospitals and doctors, unless one has deep enough pockets or gold standard health insurance, access to those hospitals and doctors is very limited. U.S. citizens have lower life expectancy, high infant mortality, shorter healthy life expectancy and are generally less happy with their health care systems than people of Western Europe or even Canada which is held up as the bogeyman. If our system is so great, why do we spend so much and yet have worse outcomes than the rest of the world’s industrialized nations?
Mr. Love also fails to present a fair and balanced discussion on costs. Here in the U.S., we spent roughly double per capita or as a percentage of GPD as the citizens of Canada, New Zealand or Europe. Perhaps they do have lines for elective and non-critical procedures at times, but if they spent anything like what we spend, those would evaporate immediately. Moreover, while rich Americans can get instant service by writing a big check, anyone who is insured with an HMO already waits for appointments/minor surgeries. When I had to schedule a routine colonoscopy, the wait for an appointment was roughly six weeks. From start to finish, it took over two months for me to be checked. The bugaboo of government rationing care or getting between doctors and patients is often used to scare us, but the speakers rarely admit that insurance companies are doing that now with far more interest in the bottom line than in our health.
Mr. Love also relays a few anecdotes of poor service in single-payer countries. A few anecdotes are not data on which to base important decisions. For each of those stories, any one of us could repeat similar problems if not worse here in the U.S. in our for-profit system. Waits in American emergency care are hours long, occasionally ending in patients dying without being seen too. We also have insurance companies canceling people’s insurance as soon as they are diagnosed with an expensive condition. Now that’s a true free market response — jettison those who actually need their health insurance. Don’t read the fine print and you will find your chemo rider is void, sticking you with $1,000,000 in bills even though you had insurance. This happened to close friends who purchased health insurance from a local broker. Cancer survival rates in many single-payer countries are not that different than in the U.S. The main difference is more explained by how much is being spent on MRIs than on the way health care is being paid for.
The other great bogeyman of the right, trial lawyers, also get blamed for our cost structure even though the cost of malpractice trials cost less than one half of one percent of our health costs in 2001. Lawyers are a nice whipping boy but the data make a lie of the basic assertion.
The suggestion that health savings accounts will solve our problem is laughable. These have been around for years now and no great mass of people are using them. In my experience, insurers do everything they can to avoid catastrophic care plans as they aren’t profitable. If these plans were going to make a difference we’d have seen evidence by now. This suggestion is merely a distraction rooted in the mythology of markets solving problems. If recent history has taught us anything it’s that markets only work to maximize the profits of the strong players at the expense of the weak. Relying on the free market to fix healthcare when it has failed to do so for generations is the classic foolishness of repeating the same action over and over and expecting a different outcome. Our system rewards insurance and drug companies at the expense of individual patients. Let’s not keep doing that.
We need a public option in our health care system. This American has lived with a single-payer system for over six years in Europe and I’d gladly exchange the junk health insurance that costs me $7,000 a year before we get a dime of coverage for a public health option again. My guess is that there are millions if not hundreds of millions of Americans who would agree.
Dave Camp, Anahola
