This started as a comment on John Edwards blog, but it is such a simple and short way of moving the Overton Window on healthcare that I thought I would share it here as well.
Basically, we never hear anything positive about any other countries healthcare systems, just about how ours is the best in the world. If you can afford it.
But if you look at the facts, that best-in-the-world argument quickly falls apart, and the cost we pay is significantly higher than for any other country in the world. So why don't we at least take a unbiased look at other countries systems? Why doesn't Congress start a year-long process of hearings, first identifying those 3-5 countries with the best outcomes at the lowest cost, and then investigating how those systems work? And using that information to reform our system from the bottom up?
UPDATED: Facts on wait times, over the flip.
Why not indeed! But it's going to take grassroots effort to move the Overton Window far enough over to make it happen. Your effort. Some simple facts on the flip...
Conyers has the only plan that moves to a single payer system, like virtually every other industrialized country. It works in other countries, as the following facts show:
- The US pays far more for health care than any other country in the world, at 15.3% of GDP (next highest is Switzerland at 11.6%, 30-country average is 8.9%) and at $6100 per person (next highest is Luxembourg at $5090 per person, the 30-country average is $2550)
- The two major outcomes for measuring healthcare are infant mortality and life expectancy, and in both we fall well below the 30-country average. To quote:
Most OECD countries have enjoyed large gains in life expectancy over the past 40 years. In the United States, life expectancy at birth increased by 7.6 years between 1960 and 2003, which is less than the increase of over 14 years in Japan, or 8.6 years in Canada. In 2004, life expectancy in the United States stood at 77.5 years, below the OECD average of 78.3 years. Japan, Iceland, Switzerland, Sweden and Australia were the 5 countries registering the highest life expectancy.
Infant mortality rates in the United States have fallen greatly over the past few decades, but not as much as in most other OECD countries. It stood at 6.9 deaths per 1000 live births in 2003, above the OECD average of 5.7. Among OECD countries, infant mortality is the lowest in Japan and in the Nordic countries (Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Finland), with rates all below 3.5 deaths per 1 000 live births.
- What is the primary difference in our system and 28 of the 30 others? They all have single-payer, non-profit, government-run systems. Most also have additional private insurers for those that want and can afford them
SOURCE: http://www.oecd.org/...
My proposal is to have Congress start hearings on the other countries systems, first identifying the 3-5 with excellent outcomes at low cost, and then taking a closer look at those and using the results to reform our system from the bottom up. I would start with Japan and Sweden, both of whom have top-five outcomes for less than half the cost we pay.
When you start digging on this subject and find out that Medicare's administration expenses are between 1/3 and 1/10 of private insurers, and you see how virtually every other industrialized country uses it with better results for far less money, universal single-payer healthcare starts looking pretty good.
UPDATE: On the argument that all those single-payer countries have horrible wait times:
In OECD countries with no observed waiting times for elective surgery – such as the United States, France, Switzerland, Japan, Belgium and Germany – all insured individuals enjoy timely access to care irrespective of whether their main form of coverage is public or private health insurance. These countries generally include insurance-based systems (public or private), where money follows the patient, specialists are paid fee-for-service rather than on the basis of salaries, and there are lower overall constraints on activity than occurs in health systems with tighter caps on activity and spending (Siciliani and Hurst, 2003).
Note that only one of the countries listed doesn't have a single-payer system. Source: http://www.oecd.org/...
So when people start decrying "socialized medicine", ask them why, if every other civilized country in the world can do it better for far less money than we do, shouldn't we at least take a look at their systems?