By: Gary Kamiya
Source: salon.com
Watching the current “debate” over President Obama’s attempt to reform America’s broken healthcare system, you have to pinch yourself to realize that you’re not having a nightmare.
Our healthcare system is a national disgrace. We are the only high-income industrialized nation in the world not to guarantee coverage for all our citizens with some form of a single-payer system. We are by far the wealthiest nation on earth, but we rank 38th in life expectancy, below Cuba. In the key index of infant mortality, we badly trail other nations that have national healthcare: We have 6.26 deaths per live births, compared to Canada’s 5.04, Britain’s 4.85, Germany’s 3.99 and France’s 3.33. Although we spend far more money on our healthcare than any other country, whether the expenditure is measured as a percentage of GDP or per capita, a staggering 45 million Americans were uninsured in 2007, 15 percent of the population. By all key measures, our healthcare is inferior to those of other industrialized countries. A 2007 Commonwealth Fund study compared U.S. healthcare with that in five other nations — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Germany and the United Kingdom — and found that America was either last or next to last in the five dimensions of quality, access, efficiency, equity and healthy lives.
This is not about ideology, only results. Americans are supposed to be supreme problem solvers, pragmatists. If a market-driven system was working, we should keep it. But it isn’t, largely because a third of the costs of healthcare are in administration, and the innumerable competing plans drive up that cost by billions of dollars — a problem that the single-payer system avoids. No one expects fanatical right-wing ideologues, who would rather condemn millions of Americans to inadequate or nonexistent care than hand Obama a political victory, to recognize that healthcare is one area in which the free market approach has simply failed. But it is shocking that so many average Americans apparently do not recognize that there is nothing red, white and blue about placing their health in the oh-so-caring hands of gigantic insurance companies and pharmaceuticals. Or that the “big government” that conservatives have been denouncing since Reagan is what makes successful programs like Medicare, the Veteran’s Administration and, for that matter, the military itself, possible.
