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Name:
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copperline
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Subject:
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A national healthcare system
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Date:
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4/3/2012 7:57:16 PM
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This
thread is about to run out of steam but since i started it, let me make a few
more observations. it’s a terribly
complex issue with lots of POV’s, but no one here argued that it is good for
us to have lot of people going without healthcare coverage. Disagreement with Universal Coverage comes
from questions of how we would pay for it, whether the government caused the
inflation of healthcare in the first place (and could fix it by ‘undoing’
this), and whether the government could deliver a system more efficiently than a
multitude of private companies… but no one said it would be bad if everyone had
basic care. Everyone seems to agree that the costs of
caring for uninsured people results in higher prices passed along and
ultimately paid by all of us. There was
some suggestion that we might not actually have a national healthcare problem
because free care is available in any ER, still….most people agree that rising
costs are threatening the system and ER care is not really “free”. Wix
offered some specific ideas, but i think he might agree his ideas would only
plug a few holes in a very leaky ship.
Here
are some numbers to ponder: 16.3% (50
million) of us don’t have healthcare insurance. 9.9 million of these are non-citizens, but 40
million are citizens. 31/% of people in the US relied on government
programs for healthcare in 2010, and this number is on the increase…. it was
24.2% in 1999. And the
World Health Organization ranked US Healthcare highest in costs…. but 37th
in overall performance, and 72nd in overall level of health in
2000.
65% of
Americans have commercial insurance policies thru their jobs or by direct purchase, and 31% rely on public programs. 14.5% (45 million) are on Medicare, 15.9%
Medicaid (48 million), and 4.2% (13 million) have military health insurance. With this public-private system,
the U.S. spends more on healthcare than any other nation in the world, but is the only wealthy industrialized country in
the world that lacks some form of universal health care. We also spend more money per person than any other
nation, and a greater percentage of total income in the US is spent on health care
than in any UN member state.
But if
government programs only account for 35% of the market, how can we say
that the government alone has caused the inflationary spiral? 65% of our healthcare was administered by for-profit corporations. Everybody focuses on
the need to reduce the government’s presumed role in the problem, and shies away from the need to change the impact of profit-driven
strategies even though these occupy the majority of the market. i don't understand how we can have faith that if the government "just got out of the way" and let those corporations create our national healthcare policy... that we would all be better off.
So why
don’t more people just buy commercial health care policies? What would happen if we pared back government
programs and told all those people to start looking for private
medical insurance? The average commercial premium for family
coverage is now $13,770 per year now…and that cost has doubled in the past 10
yrs. This means 1 in 4 working adults are already uninsured
& 9.8% of kids under 18 have no coverage in spite of government programs
targeting them.
in
Canada, the only country easily comparable to the US in
size and culture, they have a single-payer healthcare system. in 2006, per-capita spending for health care
in Canada was (converted to US dollars) $3,678; in the U.S., $6,714. Here we spent 15.3% of our GDP on health care
in that year; Canada spent only 10.0%. Studies do have different opinions when comparing the details of the two systems, but not the fundamentals. But a 2007 review of all
studies comparing health outcomes in Canada and the US in a Canadian
peer-reviewed medical journal found that "health outcomes may be superior
in patients cared for in Canada versus the United States, but differences are
not consistent." Canada appears to have found a way to constrain the growth of their healthcare costs. We haven't. Whether the differences were
consistent or not, Canadians spent much less, had more of their citizenry
covered by health insurance, and had at least the same health outcomes we
did. To me, that's pretty strong
evidence that our way isn't the only way of doing things.
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