Universal Health Care
Mark Steyn on universal health care:
I don’t have much to add to Jonah’s and Iain’s posts, but hey, that’s never stopped me before. So let me just say that I think socialized health care is the single biggest factor in transforming the relationship of the individual to the state. In fact, once it’s introduced it becomes very hard to have genuinely conservative government – certainly, not genuinely small government. I think I say in my book that in Continental cabinets (and in Canada) the Defense ministry is somewhere you pass through en route to a really important portfolio like Health. Election campaigns become devoted to competing pledges about “fixing†health care, even though by definition it never can be.
In a public health care system, the doctors, nurses, janitors and administrators all need to be paid every Friday so the only point at which costs can be controlled is through the patient, by restricting access. If you go to an American doctor with a monstrous lump on your shoulder, it’s in his economic interest to find out what it is and get it whipped off as soon as possible. If you go to a British or Canadian doctor, it’s in the system’s economic interest to postpone it as long as possible. And because the public will only sit around on waiting lists for two or three years, eventually in order to control costs you have to claw it out of other budgets – like Defense. Socialized health care is the biggest cause not just of the infantilization of the citizenry but of the state.
Now, I am a conservative and I am a big opponent of Big Government, but lets not act as if universal health care is the root of all of Europe’s problems. Our health care system needs to be improved, that is for sure, but it is not as bad as Jonah thinks it is. In the end, we do not have citizens who do not receive treatment because they do not have enough money, which I consider to be a good thing.
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22 Responses to “Universal Health Care”
That has to be one of the dumbest, most bone-headed articles I’ve ever read. Steyn completely ignores some of the differences between any universal not-for-profit system and the current American all-about-the-profit system. He claims
But it’s not up to him, is it? Unless his patient has the economic means to pay for it himself it will depend on the insurance company’s opinion, won’t it? Is there any reason in the universe they can come up with to refuse to cover the treatment? If there is they’re paying people to come up with it.
In addition Mr. Steyn fails to note the absolute epidemic of health insurance companies that take months to pay out to the doctors and how that practice not only causes doctors to be pinched economically but for hospital billing systems to often turn patient accounts over to collection agencies as past due because the insurance situation still isn’t settled. So no matter how fast the doctor might take care of you there’s no telling how long it will be before he’s paid anything by the insurance company. And before the libertarians among us attempt to claim that this is proof that health insurance should be eliminated and everyone just pay their own way I can only say that you shouldn’t bother with that argument until you propose a realistic way for the average working American to be able to afford it aside from pie-in-the-sky unproven claims about how your way of doing it will cause prices to fall so much that it’s doable.
He also fails to note that in spite of the constant efforts of American conservatives to twist the facts it is true that the government programs in the U.S. spend only a quarter of the amount the private insurance companies do on administrative overhead.
I suspect that the government is more efficient is not correct. I believe it is based upon the government budget line items and confused in house admnistraiton costs with upper management and central management costs.
A VA Hospitals actually has more administration considering how many services it does not provide. The DoD facilities are even worse in terms of management.
Most hospitals are not-for-profit corporation. That however does not mean that they do not make money or lose money.
If the government decides the reinbursement for all medical procedures, the government decides the winner and losers. Currently, a hospital better have a one year plan to make back all capital costs for any new venture since the government can change the reimbursement rate and make any procedures an immediate money loser.
Although Michigan requires hospitals to be non-profits, many hospitals do seek a profit. Lifepoint, HCA, and Triad come immediately to mind, here’s a chart.
You can suspect anything you want, SD. It’s just that kind of specious reasoning I was referring to in my post. You couldn’t care less about anything resembling the facts because your conservative ideology has already told you, government bad, corporation good.
Jim:
Add to your list co’s terminating medical insurance when a two weeks’ notice is given and employees not realizing that a doctor’s visit or treatment is suddenly uncovered, until mos. later.
The arguments against healthcare are so ridiculous and made so often that there are ample reasons to fix any problems before the system goes online. To argue against it means you are a) rich b) an ideologue c) a & b.
If you look at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2007/veterans.html
You will see that Medical services for the VA is 21,376 and medical administration is 3,310. If you compare the two numbers, you get the 15% VA administration costs that Kevin Drum and the Washington Monthly throws around very loosely. The quote “ Administration appropriation provides funds for the expenses of
management, security, and administration of VA health care system. VA employs
32,653 FTE in this function. Program resources also cover administrative services such
as physician transcription services, managerial oversight function related to operations
of the VA medical system including implementing new procedures, follow-up Inspector
General audits, implementation of Veterans Equitable Resource Allocation (VERA), and
processing enrollment applications for both veterans and CHAMPVA beneficiaries.
It does not include things like credentialing, quality assurance, institutional review boards, and many other things that companies like HCA would include as administration costs.
Of course the VA hospitals do not have OB, pediatrics, neonatology, Emergency rooms, sports medicine, or many other departments that exist in community hospitals. That also makes their administration much easier. See http://www.washingtondc.va.gov/departments/index.asp
You can also look up
http://www.auntminnie.com/index.asp?sec=ser&sub=def&pag=dis&ItemID=63000
to see how CMS reimbursement affects adopters of new technology.
I hope that is enough facts for you and note that none of them came from an activist website. In the future, I hope you can do the same.
Only fools believe universal health care is, or would be, wonderful. We are simply going to be exchanging one set of problems for another. [sigh]
Only neoliths want to remain in a bad situation that can only get worse, as it has, every year for the last 20+.
Only fools think that it would be worse than what happens now. Only fools will take the RNC, insurance company and corporate hospital chain talking points as facts. Only fools think that any minor changes we make that leave the same corporations in place with the same motivations to hose the public are our best alternatives. Only fools are so dumb that they think that the only alternatives are to look around at what currently exists and choose one system instead of actually working at trying to come up with something different that might incorporate parts of other systems that seem viable while dropping others that drag us down.
Jim, I noticed that you moveon.org talking point did not have any facts in it. I have always seen what you are doing as from the activist playbook. Demand facts from your opponents in the spirit of cooperation but instead of coming back with facts and studies, you just nitpick and bomb throw.
Government run healthcare can be horrible, just look at Walter Reed or King-Drew medical center (both government run).
What companies are making great profits and are not-for-profits doing any better.
Remmeber, facts please and not cites of activist blogs or homepages.
Facts SD? Hmmm, how about from the World Health Organization? Good enough for you? Let’s see where the American Healthcare system is ranked…
Well, look at it this way, we beat Slovenia…barely.
You can look more in depth at the ranking if you like. You can see that the US is…
– number 72 on overall health
– number 54-55 on fairness and distribution of healthcare.
– Number 1 (Finally!)….on per capita spending on healthcare.
Yeah, that nasty universal healthcare, who wants it? It’s not a statistic but I think it bears mentioning. In Spain the complaint list about our public healthcare system is long (there is private healthcare for those who wish it) but there is something that no one doubts, they’d rather have this than the US system. The very idea that you could literally not be able to go to the doctor or be economically ruined by being sick sounds simply bizarre. If at least you saved money, but it looks like not even, what we pay in taxes you pay in premiums, except I pay less.
I thought of many things to say in response to the utter stupidity of your comment about moveon.org talking points, SD. Most of them would probably get me kicked off of this blog.
Everything I posted about the lack of payment by insurance companies, collection agencies, etc. are what I have personally encountered in dealing with hospitals, doctor’s offices and insurance companies. Between my deceased parents, my mother-in-law’s cancer and my wife’s health problems I have seen more of their crap than I ever dreamed. None of it came from any activist web sites.
As far as something to confirm my claim here’s one article about a hospital that is cutting off an unreliable insurance company and suing them.
And should executives in the industry receive astronomical compensation as everyone in the universe is complaining about costs? Sorry, I forgot who I was addressing.
I guess Anecdotal stories in what passes for “facts” these days. It is easy to develop a healthcare system in your own mind that perfectly match what you need. However, in the real world, the government will either develop a one size fits all.
The U.S. is not Spain. What works in Maryalnd probably will not work in Wyoming. Spain is not the U.S. As a function of GDP, Spain is about the same size as Texas. Texas could probably develop some sort of healthcare system that would work in Houston or Dallas but probably fail everywhere else.
As I said, your mind is made up based solely on your ideology as you prove with this insightful comment
There has to be a solution.
Total government health care will be a disaster.
Total corporate health care is a disaster for those who cannot afford outrageous health care premiums or who fail to have a good job which covers them.
I started looking into premiums for insurance and they are outrageous. Many of them are more expensive then a house mortgage.
That sounds sorta absurd to me. I have government insurance as a retired military officer, however I find that my daughter is paying like 355 a month for health insurance and that is after the bank she works at pays the other 355 a month.
Despite my conservative leanings I realize that a solution to this must be found because it is getting near impossible for most Americans to afford health care.
Somewhere we need to find solutions instead of argue the same talking points.
Universal health care is good.
Is not!!
Is Too!!
Is Not!!
Is Too!!
This hardly solves anything.
My personal opinion is that given current conditions and what just might barely be achievable I’d like to see Medicaid and Medicare subsumed into a new organization that would also have a much larger mandate. It would have basically the same relationship to the government that the post office has. Its job would be health care. Not just insurance but multiple aspects of health care would come into play because insurance alone wouldn’t be enough in some cases. Is there any real reason they shouldn’t hire doctors and run clinics in poverty stricken areas whether urban or rural? It would do these things on a sliding fee scale similar to what I saw in working for Planned Parenthood. If you don’t have money you don’t pay. The more money you have the more you pay up to what would basically be “market rates”.
Employers could cover the cost of insurance for their employees as a benefit or even stick purely to the private insurance sector but because of the sliding fees no one would lose their health care because of losing their job because their cost would drop to zero until they find another job. Because there is no one size fits all solution I think there are things that could hopefully be done for rural areas that aren’t being done now like a bus/truck tandem that could actually provide mobile clinics for any rural areas that have severe problems with getting health care.
Something else that I think should be done is to remove the artificial barriers between different kinds of health care. Dental care (non-cosmetic) and mental health care are just as important to overall health as your internal medicine specialist or orthopedic surgeon.
Just some speculation on somewhere we might go.
So SD, you ask for fact, but when I show you a world ranking that shows that countries with socialized medicine are ABOVE the US in health, including countries as disparate as France, the UK, Canada and Japan, it’s still not good enough? How convenient for you. You discard the fact out of hand because it does not support your view. Should I believe that if the US had been at the top of the ranking you wouldn’t have used this as a justification for the current system? Right.
Add the hidden costs we pay currently.
Health care costs incurred by the uninsured, who can’t pay the bills get absorbed into the system, and we all pay.
Poor health care contributes significantly to poor school performnac, and poor school performance leads to poor paticipation in the economy.
We all pay, anyway, one way or the other.
Poor preventative care leads to hgiher medical costs, and we all pay.
The plans put forth by the Dem candidates are just band-aids.
We need radical change, and universal health care is the only answer available. There will be problems, for sure. What area of lide doesn’t have problems? But at least this would begin to look like a modern country, not some 19th century backwater, whete a certain sector of sodiety is expected to die in a timely fashion in order not to spoil the scenery.
I did not dispute that a country like Japan that is ethnically 100% from one group can produce a better medium health outcome that a diverse country like the U.S. an produce for a medium health outcome.
However, as I pointed out, Spain, Norway, France, and Japan are not the United States. Japan does not have a population that nclude 20 million illegal aliens and does not have a population that is 12% black and 13% Hispanic. All the countries you listed are smaller than Texas in land mass. They are defiitely not the U.S.
If you look at life expectancy, a Japanese American will live longer, on average, than a citizen of Japan. It is one of the oddities on health statistics.
I love how people propose systems such as the government will make sure you always have free health care (and call it insurance even through their no insurance, risk management portion of the program) and refuse to believe that people will not totally game the system.
Any system that provide the same healthcare to someone who spends their time surfing in Hawaii as someone who gets up every morning and goes to work and pays taxes is doomed to failure.
Seems like Lynx provided the facts and those against healthcare ignored her. Until they respond to her link’s claims, what more is there to say?
Simply put, no system will be perfect, and waiting for a perfect system and doing nothing is a silly way to approach things. What we have now is terrible. Period. Unless you’re rich.
Japan may be homogeneous but Spain is not. It has a large population of immigrants from Africa. Germany has a number of immigrants from Africa, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
SD posts something as ludicrous as this:
and still expects to be taken seriously. Given that we did have welfare reform and there’s nothing that I’m aware of that would let his hypothetical surfer buy food and clothing what fantasy land is SD imagining? Oh, that’s right. He had to make up something, didn’t he?
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