Further Thoughts On Our Ailing Nation

In yesterday's post I expressed my disgust over the current U. S. health care system, and also stated my lack of enthusiasm for the passage of the House's health care reform bill. My fear is that it was more of a political victory, a symbolic win, than a practical victory for the American people.

We need nothing less than what President Franklin Roosevelt proposed back 1944 in his address to Congress, The Economic Bill Of Rights; one of the rights he mentioned is: "The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health."

Attempted reform of the insurance industry will not accomplish that. It is almost impossible for me to believe that the insurance reforms contained in this bill will not be met with further chicanery on the industry's part in order to maintain their stranglehold on the system.

That, of course, is provided the bill even passes the Senate in anything like its present form. The government health insurance plan that is part of the bill may be its Achilles' heel once the matter is debated there. A compromise idea is that of only allowing the government plan if, in the words of Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu, "the private market fails to reform."

Well, what are the odds of that?

Sara Robinson well wrote in her defense of Canadian Healthcare:

Any system that has people spending more and getting less is, by definition, not efficient. And these efficiency leaks are, almost entirely, due to private greed. There is no logical way that a private system can pay eight-figure CEO compensation packages, turn a handsome a profit for shareholders, and still be "efficient." In fact, in order to deliver those profits and salaries, the American system has built up a vast, Kafkaesque administrative machinery of approval, denial, and fraud management, which inflates the US system's administrative costs to well over double that seen in other countries -- or even in our own public systems, including Medicare and the VA system.

Not incidentally: one of the benefits of single-payer health care is that it largely eliminates the entire issue of "fraud." You can only "cheat" a system that already views its primary business as rationing and withholding care. In Canada, where the system is set up to deliver health care instead of profits, and medical access is considered a right, this whole oversight machinery is far cheaper and more compact. In general, the system trusts doctors and patients to make the right choices the first time. As a result, people generally don't have to lie, cheat, and grovel to get the system to deliver the care they need. They just go and get it -- and walk out without a moment's dread about the bills.

Pardon my cynicism in saying that the reason nothing meaningful is going to get done, that our representatives in Washington will continue to avoid "fixing" the health care crisis, is because they are blinded due to their being up to their hairlines in money from lobbyists and special interest groups who seek to maintain the status quo as much as possible.