When all their other arguments about the advantages of the current US health care system compared to universal, single-payer systems in France, Canada, England, Germany, etc. are shown to be false, apologists for the US health care system turn to their trump card: alleging that wait times to see a doctor in those countries is longer than it is in the US. This statement by the lobbying group America’s Health Insurance Plans is typical: “The American people do not support a government takeover of the entire health-care system because they know that means long waits for rationed care.”

The problem with this type of allegation is that the US does not systematically collect data on wait times, whereas the other countries do collect the data and make them public. The assumption seems to be that in the US, if there is no data, then the wait times must be zero. No data, no problem!

But using the scant data that is available, BusinessWeek points out that except in a few selected, non-emergency situations, even this charge is false: “In reality, both data and anecdotes show that the American people are already waiting as long or longer than patients living with universal health-care systems.”

As Paul Krugman points out in his New York Times July 16, 2007 column:

[B]y and large, opponents of universal health care paint a glowing portrait of the American system that bears as little resemblance to reality as the scare stories they tell about health care in France, Britain, and Canada.

The claim that the uninsured can get all the care they need in emergency rooms is just the beginning. Beyond that is the myth that Americans who are lucky enough to have insurance never face long waits for medical care.
. . .
[N]ot all medical delays are created equal. In Canada and Britain, delays are caused by doctors trying to devote limited medical resources to the most urgent cases. In the United States, they’re often caused by insurance companies trying to save money.

This can lead to ordeals like the one recently described by Mark Kleiman, a professor at U.C.L.A., who nearly died of cancer because his insurer kept delaying approval for a necessary biopsy. ”It was only later,” writes Mr. Kleiman on his blog, ”that I discovered why the insurance company was stalling; I had an option, which I didn’t know I had, to avoid all the approvals by going to ‘Tier II,’ which would have meant higher co-payments.”

He adds, ”I don’t know how many people my insurance company waited to death that year, but I’m certain the number wasn’t zero.”

(You can read about Kleiman’s plight here, which occurred despite having what he calls “fancy-dancy health insurance through my employer, which as it happens also owns one of the world’s dozen best medical centers”.)

And what about that favorite of US health care apologists, the waiting time for hip replacements? Krugman looked at that too:

On the other hand, it’s true that Americans get hip replacements faster than Canadians. But there’s a funny thing about that example, which is used constantly as an argument for the superiority of private health insurance over a government-run system: the large majority of hip replacements in the United States are paid for by, um, Medicare.

That’s right: the hip-replacement gap is actually a comparison of two government health insurance systems. American Medicare has shorter waits than Canadian Medicare (yes, that’s what they call their system) because it has more lavish funding — end of story. The alleged virtues of private insurance have nothing to do with it.

Krugman’s conclusion is right on target:

The bottom line is that the opponents of universal health care appear to have run out of honest arguments. All they have left are fantasies: horror fiction about health care in other countries, and fairy tales about health care here in America.

POST SCRIPT: Déjà vu

As usual, cartoonist Tom Tomorrow succinctly captures how the media is colluding with the administration in fanning the flames for war with Iran, exactly the way it did with Iraq.

(For previous posts on the topic of health care, see here.)

In my previous posts following on the film Sicko (Haven’t seen the film yet? It is well worth it.) I have been focusing on the tangible costs and benefits of the US health care system compared to those of other developed countries, and showing why the US system comes out badly in comparison. The chief culprit is the insertion of profit-making private health insurance companies between the patient and health care providers, creating an immediate trade-off between profit and providing care that is detrimental to the latter.

But there are several intangibles that are also important. The main one is that having one’s health insurance tied to one’s place of employment highly distorts the basis on which people make important life decisions. Right now, many people make decisions of what job to take and where to live based on the health care provided by employers. People with families and young children are especially caught in a bind. Some people spend their entire lives in dead-end jobs that they hate, trapped because of the fact that they cannot afford to leave and lose the health benefits. This is especially so if they or a member of their family has a health problem that becomes a non-covered ‘pre-existing condition’ in their new workplace, and thus denied coverage, at least for a limited time.

What is the cost of this? For one thing, it discourages entrepreneurs and freelancers. A person who wants to quit his or her job to start their own business or implement an innovative idea is strongly discouraged from doing so, especially if they have families. Not only is the cost of purchasing private insurance for themselves prohibitive, so is the cost for providing it for their employees. In 2004, the average cost of health insurance for family coverage was $9,950, which means that it is likely to be around $12,000 in 2007. This is close to the amount earned annually by a full-time minimum wage worker. How many business ideas have never seen the light of day, how many jobs never created, because potential innovators just could not bring themselves to risk the health of their families by leaving their jobs?

Health insurance tied to businesses also discourages the creative arts. Painters, writers, sculptors, poets, actors, dancers, and musicians are people who add enormously to the quality of life of a community. A community that has a vibrant arts community is one that is lively and healthy. Most artists do not go into it for the money (although they have dreams of their work becoming widely recognized someday) but because they really love what they do and are willing to suffer some hardship for it. They are willing to forego luxuries and live fairly Spartan lives with respect to housing, food, clothing and the like, just to have the opportunity to create art. Many are willing to take part-time jobs to cover life’s essentials so that they have the time and freedom to devote to their passion. But the biggest single expense for such people is the cost of buying health insurance as private individuals. Many simply do not do so, gambling that they will not get very sick.

Then we have young people, straight out of high school or college who may want to experience a carefree life for at least a short time before settling down, and maybe travel around this vast country doing various jobs, seeing new things, meeting new people, and learning about the various communities they pass through. Maybe they want to work in underprivileged areas. Right now, the only way to safely do that is to do it through an organization that provides health insurance. If they go on their own, they have to buy expensive private health insurance or take the risk that they will not need health care. Even for the volunteer organizations that provide health insurance, providing it is a big headache and expense.

Then there is the problem of transitioning between jobs and between school and jobs. There are often gaps between the times when students leave college and start their first jobs. Because they have left school, they no longer are covered by their family or school health insurance policies. They have to shop around for some coverage for the transition period until they get their first job. People who have a gap when they move from one job to another can sometimes use COBRA coverage during the transition.

Even people who like their jobs and have health insurance plans to choose from (the so called ‘lucky ones’) face all kinds of irritations. The family may select an insurance plan and from it choose pediatricians for their children, an internist for the parents and a gynecologist for the mother, all within that one plan. The next year, they are likely to find that some of the physicians are now on different plans. So you have to repeat the process of comparing health care plans, weighing the costs and benefits, comparing physician lists, and trying to figure out who and what to keep and to jettison. This has to be done every year. And then you have to keep track of all the paperwork and receipts and co-payments. I think people have got so beaten down that they simply do not realize how much time goes into taking care of all these details. It is only when they get drawn into the bureaucratic nightmare that results when coverage is denied or some major illness strikes that they realize what a crazy system they are in.

Why have people in the US become so numb and accepting of this state of affairs? In surveying the responses to the film Sicko, James Clay Fuller makes a good point:

Not one mentions the comments by Tony Benn, a former member of Britain’s Parliament. Yet Benn’s statements probably are the most profound element of the film.

He notes, as other good people often do, that “if we have the money to kill (in war), we’ve got the money to help people.”

But, more importantly, Benn tells Moore, that all of Europe and many other places have good health care systems while the United States lacks such a basic service because in Europe and elsewhere, “the politicians are afraid of the people” when the people get angry and demand some action. In the United States, he observes, “the people are afraid of those in power” because they fear losing their jobs, fear being cut off from health care or other services if they speak up and make demands.

“How do you control people?” Benn asks, and he answers: “Through fear and debt.”

His point is that in the United States we have a great overabundance of both.

When are people going to get angry enough to say “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore”?

POST SCRIPT: The invertebrate Congress

On Bill Moyers’ show, Conservative Bruce Fein argues why Bush should be impeached and criticizes a spineless Congress for not doing so, and John Nichols (author of the book The Genius of Impeachment) agrees.

Here is a transcript.

Another conservative Paul Craig Roberts (Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration and former Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review) has also called for the immediate impeachment of both Bush and Cheney.

The idea of impeachment was inserted into the US constitution as a vital check against the president assuming dictatorial powers akin to those of a king. It was almost tailor-made to deal with situations like that which currently exists. But the Democratic Party leadership seems unwilling to do this.

(For previous posts on the topic of health care, see here.)

I think almost everyone across the political spectrum would concede the fact that the fifty million Americans currently without health insurance would definitely benefit from the adoption of a universal, government-run, single-payer health care system. The reason that it has not been adopted is that many of the remaining 250 million have been frightened into thinking that their medical coverage would decline from what they have now.
[Read more…]

(For previous posts on Sicko and the merits of a government-run, universal, single payer health care system, see here and here.)

Michael Moore’s excellent film Sicko has cinematically exposed the deep flaws of the US health system. His film scarcely touches on the awful plight of the 50 million people who have no insurance at all. That would have been bad enough but instead he sought to highlight the plight of those who do have health insurance and think they are secure, but discover to their horror that their insurance companies let them down in their moments of greatest need.

He emphasizes the fact that when you introduce profit-making entities in between the patient and the health care providers, you have guaranteed that attempts will be made to deny health care as much as possible. The insurance companies actually have employees whose task is to dig deep into your past to see if they can find anything, anything at all, that would enable them to invoke the fine print in their policies and deny coverage. Hence many people receive nasty shocks that they are not covered just as they are reeling from the discovery that they have a serious illness.

And this is why in the US you have a system in which the minority who are rich and powerful and influential have access to very good health care because they are in a position to create trouble for the insurance companies, while the vast majority are vulnerable to finding out that getting ill can mean ruin.

One of the curious things about the health care debate in the US is that the opponents of a government-run, single payer, universal health care system try to portray it as this mysterious, unknown, complicated, untried, massively bureaucratic, expensive system that one should not experiment with.

This is ridiculous. It is the system in the US that is mysterious, complicated, massively bureaucratic, and expensive. Government-run, universal, single payer systems are the norm in the developed world and in many countries of the third world. There are any number of working models that have been in existence for over half a century for which cost-benefit analyses exist and the operating structures are well known. It is the US, almost in isolation, that has a bizarre, labyrinthine, bureaucratic, and expensive system.

The basic concept of how single payer health care works is very easy to understand as this wonderful little animation illustrates. What is needed is to select the model that might adapt best to the US and modify it to meet our needs. The only difficulty to doing that would be to combat the vested interests of the health insurance and drug interests who will fight tooth and nail to keep making massive profits off the sickness of people.

Even magazines like BusinessWeek concede that the French system is superior to the US:

In fact, the French system is similar enough to the U.S. model that reforms based on France’s experience might work in America. The French can choose their doctors and see any specialist they want. Doctors in France, many of whom are self- employed, are free to prescribe any care they deem medically necessary. “The French approach suggests it is possible to solve the problem of financing universal coverage…[without] reorganizing the entire system,” says Victor G. Rodwin, professor of health policy and management at New York University.
. . .
France also demonstrates that you can deliver stellar results with this mix of public and private financing. In a recent World Health Organization health-care ranking, France came in first, while the U.S. scored 37th, slightly better than Cuba and one notch above Slovenia. France’s infant death rate is 3.9 per 1,000 live births, compared with 7 in the U.S., and average life expectancy is 79.4 years, two years more than in the U.S. The country has far more hospital beds and doctors per capita than America, and far lower rates of death from diabetes and heart disease. The difference in deaths from respiratory disease, an often preventable form of mortality, is particularly striking: 31.2 per 100,000 people in France, vs. 61.5 per 100,000 in the U.S.

There will still be some bureaucracy because it will be needed to do all the paperwork to run the health care system. But the point is that this bureaucracy is invisible to the patients. As far as the patient is concerned, you go to the doctor and you get treated. That’s it. You do not have to fill in any forms. The paperwork goes on behind the scenes between the government, the drug companies, hospitals, and the health professionals. Even for the doctors the paperwork is simplified because they are now dealing with just a single payer of their services and don’t have to keep track of multiple health insurance companies, each of which has different rules for what they can and cannot do. This is why the entire health system in Canada has fewer workers (scroll down) to serve its population of 27 million than Blue Cross requires to service less than one-tenth that population in New England alone.

But while the surface debate is about policy, the deeper debate is about a fundamental difference in philosophy

At one extreme, there are those who take the view that it is up to each one of us to look after our own interests and feel perfectly comfortable ignoring the needs of others. Such people take the point of view that each person is responsible for their health care. The ‘free market’ should operate and people should shop around for what works for them. If they do not have the means to do so, then that is their own fault or their own tough luck. They have failed to provide for themselves and cannot expect the rest of society to look after them, except for what private charities might provide.

At the other end (which is where I am) are those who feel that when it comes to basic issues like health care, it is the responsibility of every one to look after everyone else. Decent health care is not a commodity like toothpaste to be bought and sold on the market. It is a fundamental right that everyone (especially children and the elderly) is entitled to, irrespective of their ability to pay, and should be seen as a collective social obligation. Most such systems are based on spreading risk over a large number of people and because of that principle, while there are options for people to buy supplemental insurance on the private market, there cannot be an opt out provision, just as there is no opt out for police or fire systems or trash collection or libraries or parks or all the other similar collective systems that we currently have in place.

Those who oppose single payer health care systems try to frighten people with all kinds of bogeymen. The extent to which they are willing to go sometimes reaches levels of downright lunacy. In the wake of the release of Sicko, some have even said, if you can believe it, that adopting a single payer system could result in more terrorism! There are no depths of fear-mongering to which they will not sink.

But the tried and true standby to try and frighten people is the charge that single payer systems equate to ‘socialized medicine’, as if that is an automatic disqualifier.

It is a tribute to the success of the propaganda model that simply the word ‘socialism’ strikes such fear in so many people in the US. But the fact is that the word is ill-defined in this context. There are some health care systems where the hospitals are actually run by the government, and the health care professionals are government employees. This is perhaps closest to what might be meant by ‘socialized medicine’ and is close to what England has with its National Health Service. Then there is the French system where things are a mix of public and private, and the government mainly acts as the sole entity financing the system, collecting money in the form of taxes and using that to pay for services.

If the scaremongers want to invoke the word ‘socialized’ so broadly as to mean the spreading of the risk across the whole population, then that is no strange concept to the US because then socialism is already rampant in the US.

Sometimes US ‘socialism’ occurs a highly distorted form, where the risks are spread around to everyone but the benefits accrue to a wealthy few. Consider for example the FDIC insurance that banks carry. Every person is underwriting that insurance through our taxes, but it benefits the banks and those who have money to deposit. The past US government bailouts of the auto and airline industries when they were in trouble are examples where the costs and risks are borne by all of us, but the benefits accrued to a select few. The savings and loan debacle of the 1980s was again an instance of the risks and costs being ‘socialized’ (i.e., spread over the entire population), irrespective of whether people had money in the savings and loans institutions or not.

The better form of ‘socialized’ services is where everyone pays for services and everyone also benefits, such as is currently the case in the US with ‘socialized’ fire departments, ‘socialized’ police departments, ‘socialized’ parks, ‘socialized’ libraries, ‘socialized’ trash collection, ‘socialized’ hurricane and weather forecasting, ‘socialized’ air traffic control, ‘socialized’ roads, the list goes on endlessly. All these function on the assumption that there are certain things which are a collective good, and that we all should contribute to their maintenance so that we benefit as needed. ‘Socialized’ medicine should be seen as a natural addition to such existing ‘socialized’ public services, not some strange alien concept.

No health system is perfect. There will always be people who suffer and die because of the lack of equipment or drugs or incompetence. But no one should suffer and die because of the lack of ability to pay or because of bureaucratic hurdles erected in their path in order that some people can make a profit.

In the next post in this series on Thursday, I will look at the “But I’m ok, aren’t I?” attitude that opposes change in the health care system because the speaker thinks that he or she is secure now.

POST SCRIPT: Health care industry contributions to candidates

Michael Moore is helping us keep tabs on how the health care industry is contributing money to presidential candidates of both parties.

Of course, the industry is doing this purely out of a sense of public service and for the sake of supporting democracy, and not to bribe the candidates to make sure that a government run, single payer, health care system is never seriously considered, whoever happens to win.