Here's the synopsis:
1) People NEED health care. They only reason we need health insurance is the sheer expense of health care in America.
2) Health care is expensive for a variety of reasons; several of which are self-reinforcing . . . contrary to popular belief medmal/lawsuits isn't even in the top 5.
3) Sure Canada, Britain, and any other nation with a version of universal health CARE has problems. But the TWO that they rarely face are a dearth of effective preventive health care and management of chronic disease aka primary and secondary prevention. The lack of emphasis on both issues explains much of the current expense of the US system and the reason why its going to implode in the not-to-distant future.
kids
diabetes
4) Insurance companies divert health care resources to shareholders that's their one and only goal . . . profit. They increase administrative costs. They do not provide more efficient care. In fact, they operate largely as a means of siphoning health care dollars from payers (government (state/federal), corporations, individuals) before those resources can be applied to the care of people.
5) If you study the history of facilities such as King-Harbor you would realize the problem isn't that 'government' currently owns/runs the facility. The primary problem is a dysfunctional health care system on multiple levels.
6) The failure in that anecdote was of MEDICAL care. The triage nurse failed that woman. The ED supervisor failed that woman. But if King-Harbor didn't exist, many of those people wouldn't even get the opportunity to NOT get appropriate care. That's a failure of our health care system. A type of failure that does NOT exist in any industrialized nation or even in quite a few developing nations.
7) If King-Drew REFUSED to provide care to people without the means to pay for it, the facility would then be in a position to hire elite staffing, purchase state-of-the-art equipment, and STILL profit. Naturally, they would be taking the same (if not more healthcare) dollars and providing actual care to a smaller number of people.
8) Addressing the fundamental dysfunction in the financing of health care is a great place to start in reforming the system to provide more care, better care, and more efficient use of limited resources. Medicare (at several hundred billion dollars a year) is unsustainable b/c it largely funds
interventional care. Total spending on SCHIP is scarcely $10B (state/federal) yet tools don't want to expand it. In part because it's PROOF that government 'insured' health care can work VERY well. In fact, prudent use of Medicaid (poor kids only) and SCHIP (low to low-middle income) households for kids is one of the BEST uses of health care funds. Every industrialized country has demonstrated this truth. But the demagogues will invariably trot out their socialized medicine bogeyman. Curiously, it's OK at the VA and they usually tone down the Medicare rhetoric around election time . . .
