From the Archives: Pay less, get more and cover everyone (February 13, 2007)
This story originally appeared in The Daily Tar Heel.
Pay less, get more and cover everyone
By David Donovan
February 13, 2007
Sometimes in life you get real lucky and the morally right thing to do is also the clearly practical thing to do, making it all the more tragic when the right thing isn't done.
In the U.S., we have a health care crisis. There were 46.6 million Americans without health insurance in 2005, an all-time high. Infant mortality is at seven deaths per 1,000 live births, making the U.S. last among the highest-income democracies (who all belong to a club called the OECD, for short). Our nation needs what all those other countries have: universal health insurance for all.
There's a myth that covering every citizen would be way too expensive. Never mind that the U.S. is the wealthiest nation in the world and every other Western democracy manages to insure all its citizens. So the myth goes, we can't afford it.
It's just untrue. The U.S. already spends more on health care than any nation in the world. It's clearly not because we're getting the best health care. Besides ranking last in infant mortality, we're also second-last in the OECD in life expectancy and worst in obesity.
So the country that spends by far the most on health care and gets some of the worst care is also the only one that doesn't have universal coverage. Ask yourself if that sounds like coincidence.
Universal care would not be more expensive; in fact, it would save $100 to $200 billion a year, according to such hippie leftists as the Congressional Budget and General Accounting offices. Now, more money would flow to the government, so this can be painted as a tax increase, but the truth is, Americans would spend far less for health care. Basically, we're already paying for universal coverage; we're just not getting it.
How could we save so much money by covering more people? Well, the main reason is that about a fifth of the health care premiums spent by HMOs go to overhead, compared to 2 percent to 3 percent for Medicare. Because HMOs are private and profit-driven, they spend a lot of money advertising, weeding out people most likely to need expensive care and lavishing millions on CEOs. Also, universal coverage will let more people get preventive care, which is much less expensive than waiting until ailments become severe.
A Harris poll showed that 75 percent of Americans would prefer universal care, but there's a vocal minority adamantly opposed to a system that costs less, provides better care and is already used by all our peers. Some of those just have bad information, but for many the threat of universal care is that it disproves one of the bedrocks of conservative thought: that government can do nothing right. It's tough to argue the government's endless waste when it can do the job with one-tenth of the cost of the private sector.
The harm caused by the insurance gap is too severe to let ideology and ego get in the way. One of the saddest things I've heard of is an ill child having to say, "Mom, I'm sorry I got sick," because his parents were uninsured. It evokes the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane." It remains shocking today.
There'll be no universal coverage while President Bush is in office, but our next president must tackle this issue, and leaders are stepping up. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a plan for his state that, while not perfect, would be a major advance. Former Sen. John Edwards has a particularly intriguing plan where HMOs would sell to government-run "Health Markets," not individuals, perhaps leading to way to a true single-payer plan. But our national debate should be about how we provide universal care - not if.
America is imbued with a can-do spirit. We can do universal health care. And we must.
Pay less, get more and cover everyone
By David Donovan
February 13, 2007
Sometimes in life you get real lucky and the morally right thing to do is also the clearly practical thing to do, making it all the more tragic when the right thing isn't done.
In the U.S., we have a health care crisis. There were 46.6 million Americans without health insurance in 2005, an all-time high. Infant mortality is at seven deaths per 1,000 live births, making the U.S. last among the highest-income democracies (who all belong to a club called the OECD, for short). Our nation needs what all those other countries have: universal health insurance for all.
There's a myth that covering every citizen would be way too expensive. Never mind that the U.S. is the wealthiest nation in the world and every other Western democracy manages to insure all its citizens. So the myth goes, we can't afford it.
It's just untrue. The U.S. already spends more on health care than any nation in the world. It's clearly not because we're getting the best health care. Besides ranking last in infant mortality, we're also second-last in the OECD in life expectancy and worst in obesity.
So the country that spends by far the most on health care and gets some of the worst care is also the only one that doesn't have universal coverage. Ask yourself if that sounds like coincidence.
Universal care would not be more expensive; in fact, it would save $100 to $200 billion a year, according to such hippie leftists as the Congressional Budget and General Accounting offices. Now, more money would flow to the government, so this can be painted as a tax increase, but the truth is, Americans would spend far less for health care. Basically, we're already paying for universal coverage; we're just not getting it.
How could we save so much money by covering more people? Well, the main reason is that about a fifth of the health care premiums spent by HMOs go to overhead, compared to 2 percent to 3 percent for Medicare. Because HMOs are private and profit-driven, they spend a lot of money advertising, weeding out people most likely to need expensive care and lavishing millions on CEOs. Also, universal coverage will let more people get preventive care, which is much less expensive than waiting until ailments become severe.
A Harris poll showed that 75 percent of Americans would prefer universal care, but there's a vocal minority adamantly opposed to a system that costs less, provides better care and is already used by all our peers. Some of those just have bad information, but for many the threat of universal care is that it disproves one of the bedrocks of conservative thought: that government can do nothing right. It's tough to argue the government's endless waste when it can do the job with one-tenth of the cost of the private sector.
The harm caused by the insurance gap is too severe to let ideology and ego get in the way. One of the saddest things I've heard of is an ill child having to say, "Mom, I'm sorry I got sick," because his parents were uninsured. It evokes the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane." It remains shocking today.
There'll be no universal coverage while President Bush is in office, but our next president must tackle this issue, and leaders are stepping up. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a plan for his state that, while not perfect, would be a major advance. Former Sen. John Edwards has a particularly intriguing plan where HMOs would sell to government-run "Health Markets," not individuals, perhaps leading to way to a true single-payer plan. But our national debate should be about how we provide universal care - not if.
America is imbued with a can-do spirit. We can do universal health care. And we must.
posted by Ithakid | 12:22 PM
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