Healthcare

There was an article in the Los Angles Times this morning about Canadian single payer healthcare (Note: the healthcare plans being debated in Congress are not a single payer healthcare plan.)

A Canadian doctor diagnoses U.S. healthcare
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By Michael M. Rachlis
August 3, 2009

The U.S.' and Canada's different health insurance decisions make up the world's largest health policy experiment. And the results?

On coverage, all Canadians have insurance for hospital and physician services. There are no deductibles or co-pays. Most provinces also provide coverage for programs for home care, long-term care, pharmaceuticals and durable medical equipment, although there are co-pays.

On the U.S. side, 46 million people have no insurance, millions are underinsured and healthcare bills bankrupt more than 1 million Americans every year.

Lesson No. 1: A single-payer system would eliminate most U.S. coverage problems.

On costs, Canada spends 10% of its economy on healthcare; the U.S. spends 16%. The extra 6% of GDP amounts to more than $800 billion per year. [Emphasis added] The spending gap between the two nations is almost entirely because of higher overhead. Canadians don't need thousands of actuaries to set premiums or thousands of lawyers to deny care. Even the U.S. Medicare program has 80% to 90% lower administrative costs than private Medicare Advantage policies. And providers and suppliers can't charge as much when they have to deal with a single payer.
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Lesson No. 5: Canadian healthcare delivery problems have nothing to do with our single-payer system and can be fixed by re-engineering for quality.
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Compounding the confusion is traditional American ignorance of what happens north of the border, which makes it easy to mislead people. Boilerplate anti-government rhetoric does the same. The U.S. media, legislators and even presidents have claimed that our "socialized" system doesn't let us choose our own doctors. In fact, Canadians have free choice of physicians. It's Americans these days who are restricted to "in-plan" doctors.

Take a look at Frances’ healthcare, according to Business Week (2007, July 9), “France’s 62 million citizens are healthier than the U.S. population, but per capita spending on health care is also roughly half as much.” The article goes on to state, “The key to France's success is that its system, like the U.S.'s, values patient choice and physician control over medical decision-making. France does it for far less, with per capita health-care spending in 2004 at just $3,500, compared with $6,100 in the U.S., according to the World Health Organization. All told, France spends 10.7% of gross domestic product on health care vs. 16.5% in the U.S.”

I just do not see what the big deal is over healthcare, we are paying an arm and a leg to get second rate healthcare. We need to have universal healthcare now!