With true Nationalized Medicine off the table is the expense factor just media and corrupt politician propaganda? "It’s just too Expensive" is heard far too often without many facts being presented.
There was a breakout session at YearlyKos 2007 and Barack Obama said something like "You know the Canadian System didn't happen overnight." I came to the personal conclusion that a federal medical insurance program would be his stepping stone legacy and he realized that even as the most powerful man in America there would be only so much that he could achieve.
In a nation where the media is swayed by prescription drug commercials and elected officials are literally in the pockets of the medical machine there is deception at every level. It has gotten so bad and the medical lobby has been allowed to become so strong that even many voices on the left can’t take an honest look at this issue.
To make matters even worse, the present state of the economy is a deterrent to health care for all. As hard as it is to swallow almost every medical dollar that some American has to pay into this corrupt system is a dollar in the economy. That fact must be way upfront in Congress right now.
The first deterrent is the claim of higher taxes. With the way Americans have been taught to hate taxes John Edwards practically committed political suicide when he said that new taxes would pay for universal health care.
With all of the lies and deceit going on in this debate even the advocates of health care for all may be off with single payer savings estimates. Estimated savings from single payer health care may be much greater than expected.
Baker's study reported that HR 676 would reduce health spending in 2005 from $1 trillion, 918 billion dollars to 1 trillion, 861.3 billion dollars, which translates into a saving of $56 billion in overall health care spending while covering all of the uninsured. This is a 3% reduction in over-all health care spending.
Have the new taxes presented in H.R. 676 become a false deterrent? When you set aside the medical propaganda and take a good long look at the waste in this fractured and broken so called system, single payer health care would be much cheaper. Of course if we woke up tomorrow with the French medical system in place hundreds of thousands of Americans would be unemployed.
When you compare the government spending of United States that does not cover 47 million uninsured Americans and may or may not provide a flat fee $5000 subsidy for the estimated 100 million who do have private insurance to the industrialized nations that cover every single citizen the fact that the U.S. still spends more per capita is proof that something is very broken here in in the American Medical Money Pit.
United States: $5,267 on health care/ $2,364 is government spending.
Canada: $2,931 on health care / $2,048 is government spending.
France: $2,736 on health care / $2,080 is government spending.
Of course profit is the major cost that Americans are forced to pay but the amount of extra jobs in America is so out of hand. Who hasn't heard from a doctor that an operation has been denied by the insurance company "but that's just a formality." Well that doctor has to pay someone to answer that "formality" and fill out the form all over again. Multiply that by a few million cases and that is a great deal of wasted money.
As far back as 1993 a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine linked paperwork to 25% of hospital costs. The researchers claimed that the United States could save $50 billion a year in hospital costs alone, and a similar amount in insurance overhead and paperwork under one insurance provider. That would be $100 billion right there and that was in 1993 dollars.
At the turn of the century a business study pointed out that ob/gyns expense ratio were 44.1 percent of gross receipts and primary care physicians spent 40.2 percent of their gross. At the time the median expense ratio for all fields of practice combined was 36.6 percent.
In a more current look at the situation, the AMA issues a first report card on health insurers. Today "Physicians are spending 14 percent of their total revenue to simply obtain what they've earned." The multitude of insurers with different billing, payment and oversight policies has so complicated getting paid that the valuable time of our health care professionals is being wasted in red tape.
Statically the largest industry in the United States is health care. The U.S Census Bureau would disagree but once you fold nursing care facilities, legalized drug pushers, medical insurance employees, government clerks and bureaucrats and even lobbyist into the equation then somewhere there has got to be an employee cut back.
Now to a humanitarian the economy seems like no excuse but we don't have humanitarians running this nation and all of those extra jobs that don't exists in nations with nationalized medicine represent tax revue here. A conundrum that our new Democratic president and congress has to face is that contraction of the medical field would be a contraction of the immediate economy and there is little interest in creating less jobs in America.
But does nationalized medicine really cost more? And how much longer can America afford to support such a wasteful system? The biggest savings to consider is where out tax dollars are going. This may seem like the wrong time for a contraction of tax revenue but that revue is immediately thrown out the window. The medical free market is very far from free and greatly subsidized by tax dollars. We are paying more and getting less;
The U.S. health care system is typically characterized as a largely private-sector system, so it may come as a surprise that more than 60% of the $2 trillion annual U.S. health care bill is paid through taxes, according to a 2002 analysis published in Health Affairs by Harvard Medical School associate professors Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein. Tax dollars pay for Medicare and Medicaid, for the Veterans Administration and the Indian Health Service. Tax dollars pay for health coverage for federal, state, and municipal government employees and their families, as well as for many employees of private companies working on government contracts.
We actually pay more in taxes on health care than the nations with nationalized medicine too! And since there is a for profit company in the middle of all of those transactions those exorbitant administrative fees come into play.
Consider the Americans who do have coverage by the government, All Americans who make it to the age of 65 gain some extent of government coverage. Spouses and children of workers who died early receive benefits from the Social Security Administration. After going hat in hand and fighting a war with that same agency many Americans receive medical coverage a little sooner than their sixty-fifth birthday because of disability. The poor have their own separate agency in Medicaid and the children of the near poor they have another. Civil servants at both state and federal level are covered under many different insurance policies. There are the parts of the Veterans Administration that could just become a function of general medical care. The insanity in wasted human resources alone, the fact that so many Americans are employed by so many different government agencies is reason enough to fold it all into one government body or Medicare for All.
Medicare sounds like the shining star of medical insurance in America because the administrative fees are at 3% as opposed to private insurers spending 22.5%. Keeping the cost down there with the nations that do provide for their citizens is a moot point because even with Medicare there is a for profit middle man and Medicare shares the same problem as that $5000 the government pays to employers. Since this money is paid into a for profit industry, this money is another case of throwing good money after bad.
Consider those private for profit hospitals that are making so many Americans sick. The cost of a hospital stay has become insane. Because our elected officials who are charged with regulating this industry have not even willing to shine a little light in the direction of private hospitals, it is very hard to determine how much profit is involved but just like the insurance industry the administrative fees are way too costly and a waste of human resources. Just a layman's observation of how American hospitals function in the unregulated medical market it would seem that the savings would be massive if the hospitals were converted to non profit organizations. Getting that waste in line with nation's that provide nationalized medicine and removing just those profit margins would greatly reduce that over two trillion dollars spent but that won't happen anytime soon in a nation with a government that advocates for the rich and powerful.
But the pressure is mounting. Back in 2005 when health care got up to $2 trillion the media actually looked on the bright side but there are a few reality checks in this nation where Americans are Paying more and getting less.
By any measure, the United States spends an enormous amount of money on health care. Here are a few of those measures. In 2006, U.S. health care spending exceeded 16% of the nation’s GDP. To put U.S. spending into perspective: the United States spent 15.3% of GDP on health care in 2004, while Canada spent 9.9%, France 10.7%, Germany 10.9%, Sweden 9.1%, and the United Kingdom 8.7%. Or consider per capita spending: the United States spent $6,037 per person in 2004, compared to Canada at $3,161, France at $3,191, Germany at $3,169, and the U.K. at $2,560.
Medicare may appear to represent the most practical solution in an impractical nation but faces pending doom if the status quo continues. This year the earliest Baby Boomers become eligible for Social Security and in three years they will start collecting Medicare. Now this is one of the places where Barack Obama's plan may just come into play. A government agency where Americans can purchase the same medical coverage form the government as congress receives if set up without that middleman could have other government programs folded into it someday. With the amount of Americans on Medicare growing each day, someday this may just be the government's only option.
Now government may choose the economy and the establishment argument for the status quo in the coming years but the facts are accumulating and the problem is growing everyday. Isolated newspaper articles appear everyday that not only point to a failed national policy but a middle class genocide, literally government endorsed murder of the struggling taxpayers.
The examples of how tragic Health Care has become in America have become too many to count and yet H.R. 676 is not a number one priory for American politicians. Numbers that have been counted are the 40 percent of American households that either have inadequate or no coverage at all and the fact that the richest nation on earth 27,000 Americans who died in 2006 as a result of not being covered.
Let us not forget the tragic life of Esmin Elizabeth who waited 24 hours in a Brooklyn emergency room. Esmin Elizabeth waited until she died. In a nation where outgoing heartless and useless politicians claimd that all Americans have health care because "After all, you just go to an emergency room," Esmin Elizabeth is just forgotten as one of the many examples of why Americans are paying more but dying sooner in this free market of death.
In the nation that ranks last in preventing deaths from treatable conditions vast energies must be placed in a wall of propaganda. It takes a whole lot of power and money to mask the fact that as many as 27000 Americans may have died in 2006 because they didn't have medical insurance or that lack of coverage is the number three cause of death for Americans between 55 and 64.
Those vast energies are no longer impressing the American public. It is sad to say but the majority of elected officials have never felt responsible for the damage being done to Americans and the deaths being caused by the people they are accepting campaign contributions from. Those same people are the bread and butter of the media so the story is constantly downplayed. Health care for all will just get put off but the pressure to do something has reached the point where we will get something.
Well now it is the Democrats turn but look what those Republicans left the Democrats to work with. Back in June Paul Krugman claimed that the $700 billion in new revenue under President Obama is "probably not enough to pay for universal health care." Now new revenue is a thing of the past and taking a legitimate look at a real humane medical system will end up forgotten with everything else Americans must face.
Paul Krugman is definitely not a guy who doesn't get it. No matter how much red tape this government can come up with under a Canadian-style single payer system, it is hard to imagine anything like what we have now. But since there are so many bad people with so much influence a far more expensive nationalized health care plan is all we could ever expect from elected officials in this political atmosphere and they would never get past arguing about it even it it did enter a congressional debate.
But there is a better way and we have a better man. That plan presented by Barack Obama could be the answer. Considering what he has to work with and how much he can accomplish a government insurance plan for all Americans may just become that Canadian system when it becomes obvious to even the major corporations that America can no longer afford what we face now.
Things may seem so grim but Barack Obama is on it. He will be writing the blueprint and we will have someplace to go when the pain has become to great. It may not happen anytime soon but we elected a man who once said "You know the Canadian System didn't happen overnight." For America that is an enormous step in the right direction.