Meaningful Healthcare Reform Will Fail

Meaningful health reform will fail. It will fail because of big bucks and fear. Outside the gun lobby, the biggest influence is the healthcare lobby. Big pharma, equipment and the hospital corporations pour millions a year into the election campaigns of Republicans and a handful of Democrats.

Further each year millions more is poured into a war chest to be used to buy television ads that are aimed to create, and fuel fears in the minds of the general public. Healthcare reform advocacy groups cannot hope to match such spending to counter the avalanche of spending and fear mongering that will be coming. For every dollar healthcare advocates can spend the healthcare lobby will be spending more than twenty-five dollars.

The healthcare lobby and the Republicans will talk about government inefficiency and the high costs of a public system. What will never be heard is that one out of five dollars goes to pay exorbitant salaries to the top executives and stockholders. The CEOs of the major healthcare systems and firms on average make more than $12 million a year. Those who note that one out of four dollars goes to insurance company bureaucracies will not be heard. What will not be heard is that insurance companies systematically deny a host of small claims they should pay with the hope that insured will pay the bill and not ask for cogent rationale and file petition for review (with the vast majority of such petitions being paid). What will not be understood by the public is their doctors and hospitals have to have a significantly larger staff than their Canadian or British counterparts just to help process all the different forms from the plethora of insurance companies and understanding what is covered and what is not covered, and what is the patient’s co-pay.

The healthcare lobby will talk about the rationing of healthcare in a public system. What will go unsaid is that for the average citizen, the American system has far more rationing of healthcare than any of their counterparts in the western world. The average citizen’s employer provided plan allows for the insured only to use a minority of doctors, clinics and hospitals in their area. What is not said is that though the hospital may be on the list, particular doctors who are assigned your case may not be on the insurance company’s approved list. To go off the approved lists means the insurance company pays less and the patient may carry the majority of the costs.

What will remain unheard and not comprehended by the average citizen is that they are paying more than 25% more on a per capita basis than their Canadian counterparts while having a higher infant mortality rate, a significantly shorter lifespan, and over 25% of the population uninsured or significantly underinsured.

In America, dollars not facts controls the public debate. When one party can outspend the other by more than ten to one is going to win the debate more often than not. In politics, if you outspend your the other side by more than twenty to one, your avalanch will bury them and the outcome is known.

American Healthcare, Is It the Best?

Americans, particularly those on the right, strongly claim the American healthcare system is the best in the world. The greatest system, by what measure and standard? If it is the greatest number of doctors per capita, yes. If it is the most ornate and beautiful hospitals, yes. Most moderate to large communities have hospitals that are as appointed as major corporate offices. If the measure is the country that develops more medicines and machines than any other, the United States comes out on top. If the measure point is the country with the most well equipped hospitals on a per capita basis, the answer is a clear yes. Small hospitals have a plethora of the latest machines even if they sit idle several hours of the day for if they did not patients would go to the hospital down the road. Each hospital needs to have the machines in order to compete with their neighbors. It the measure is the country with a greater number of skilled medical professionals on a per capita basis than any others, yes the United States is the best. If the measure is the system that creates wealth for doctors, suppliers, hospitals, etc., most definitely the United States is the place to invest in healthcare!!

As the American healthcare system is the best, it is a reasonable expectation for that to translate into having one of the highest overall life expectancy rates in the industrialized world. If it is not at the top, American should be in the top five, and then barely edged out by those above. Does that expectation hold up?

The United States has an overall life expectancy of 78.06 years. There are 44 countries in with longer overall life expectancies than the United States. The major industrialized countries with a longer life expectancy rates are: Sweden (80.83), Australia (80.62), Canada (80.34), Italy, Spain, Norway, Israel, France, Switzerland, Japan, Austria, South Korea, Netherlands, New Zealand, Germany (78.95), Belgium, United Kingdom (78.7), and Finland (78.66). The only major industrialized country that has a lower overall life expectancy rate than the United States is Russia.

In America the Canadian healthcare is disparaged as being inferior to the United States. Whenever arguments for a government run health system is raised, the medical lobbyists ask if Americans want to settle for an inferior system like Canada’s. Canada has a life style so similar to the America. The difference between Ontario and Michigan, Ohio and New York is less than the differences those states have with North Carolina or Texas. If Canada which is culturally similar to the US has a healthcare system that is so inferior, then why are Canada’s overall life expectancy rates two years higher than their neighbor?

While the American health care system has great strengths, the claim becomes suspect when we look at how this great system translates into the care received by the average middle class family. Amongst western countries, on a per capita basis the United States has one of the lowest rates of its citizens with health insurance. Yet on a per capita basis is spends more on healthcare than most other industrialized countries.

In America tens of millions of its citizens will go three or more years without seeing a doctor for a basic check-up. Every year millions delay receiving care due to the cost of medical care. Thinking they only have a mild ailment that will clear-up too many Americans delay going to the doctor only to find out that they have a major issue that only has become more significant during the delay.

That a good number of Americans fear government healthcare should not be undervalued. A large portion of that fear is created and sustained by the healthcare industry which clearly has a significant invested interest in maintaining the status quo. While they are in the business of providing healthcare, their primary goal is not quality service as inexpensively as possible. We must be clear, the primary goal of the industry is to maximize profit throughout the system. The lobbyists have the public that managed care means some bureaucrat will make their medical care decisions rather than them and their doctor. They are told that they will not be able see the doctor of their choice but that as some government official will make that determination for them.

Those who live in places Canada, England, Sweden, Norway, Australia and Germany have not experienced some bureaucrat making such decisions in their government managed care system. In America a good number of health care plans require patients to call their insurance company, in other words an insurance bureaucrat, prior to receiving a host of treatments. Many health insurance plans in America have an approved list of doctors and hospitals, and if you receive treatment from medical practitioners or hospitals not on the list, the patient pays a much greater portion of the expense. In other words, the rationing of care by bureaucrats that the healthcare industry says will happen in government run system happens more frequently in the existing American healthcare system than it does in Canada.

The healthcare lobby, whether it is the lobby for doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical firms or the healthcare insurance industry, has an invested interest in maintaining the current structure. They have and will continue to play upon the ignorance of the general public about what the care the average citizen receives in other industrialized countries through their government managed care. They have and will inflame the fears of the unknown. Amongst the uninformed, the fear of the unknown is a powerful weapon.

One of the fundamental principles of the free market is that if you produce a superior product that is properly priced that you will not only be the leader in the market but that others will follow your lead. In other words, if you are successful others will mirror you practice. If America truly has the best medical system in the world and government healthcare is such a terrible system, why is it that no other industrialized country is adopting the American system?