Name:   copperline - Subject:   A national healthcare system Date:   4/3/2012 7:57:16 PM

              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 37^th in overall performance, and 72^nd 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.