Bushite Lies About Canada and US Health Care
I've written about universal, single payer health care coverage often, but being under the weather for the last few days, prompted today's posting.
At Campaign For America's Future, there is an excellent two part series, "Mythbusting Canadian Healthcare Part 1 and Part II" by Sara Robinson, who begins the series with this, "I'm both a health-care-card-carrying Canadian resident and an uninsured American citizen who regularly sees doctors on both sides of the border. As such, I'm in a unique position to address the pros and cons of both systems first-hand. If we're going to have this conversation, it would be great if we could start out (for once) with actual facts, instead of ideological posturing, wishful thinking, hearsay, and random guessing about how things get done up here."
In Part I she debunks 10 common lies that Republicans, especially right wing Bushites use to scare people in the United States. For example:
"Canada's health care system is "socialized medicine."
False. In socialized medical systems, the doctors work directly for the state. In Canada (and many other countries with universal care), doctors run their own private practices, just like they do in the US. The only difference is that every doctor deals with one insurer, instead of 150. And that insurer is the provincial government, which is accountable to the legislature and the voters if the quality of coverage is allowed to slide.
"You don't get to choose your own doctor.
Scurrilously False. Somebody, somewhere, is getting paid a lot of money to make this kind of stuff up. The cons love to scare the kids with stories about the government picking your doctor for you, and you don't get a choice. Be afraid! Be very afraid!
In Part II, Robinson, debunks the free marketeers, Republican Bushite corporate "health care" tycoons who want to maintain the horrendous status quo in the US......raking in billions in profit while regular working Americans must pay increasingly unaffordable costs for health care, even with workplace coverage, not counting those 50 million and rising who have no coverage at all because even the basics are too expensive.
She skewers the Republicans' canard that government run health care is inherently less efficient:
"America spends about 15% of its GDP on health care. Most other industrialized countries (all of whom have some form of universal care) spend about 11-12%. According to the WHO, Canada spends a bit over 9% -- and most of the problems within their system come out of the fact that it's chronically underfunded compared to the international average.
"Any system that has people spending more and getting less is, by definition, not efficient. And these efficiency leaks are, almost entirely, due to private greed. There is no logical way that a private system can pay eight-figure CEO compensation packages, turn a handsome a profit for shareholders, and still be "efficient." In fact, in order to deliver those profits and salaries, the American system has built up a vast, Kafkaesque administrative machinery of approval, denial, and fraud management, which inflates the US system's administrative costs to well over double that seen in other countries -- or even in our own public systems, including Medicare and the VA system."
The irony is that Bush and his administration flunkies and Republican Congressional anti-universal health care puppets disparage and lie about Canadian and other countries' universal, single payer health care, they are covered by government health care; Bush's have's and have mores are rich enough to get expensive health care.
It's the rest of us regular hardworking Americans who are on our own; millions of us struggling to pay for health care; millions having to weigh feeding their children or paying for a doctor's visit; and 18,000 dying each year in the US because of lack of health care coverage.
Robinson then delivers a one-two punch:
"We have more important matters to tend to -- like national security and the war. Getting everyone insured is, unequivocally, a clear matter of national security.
"In the U.S., that same epidemic might easily have gone unnoticed for critical days and weeks. If the first people to get sick were among those 75 million without adequate insurance, they probably would have toughed it out a few extra days before finally dragging their half-dead carcasses into an ER somewhere. Not only would they be much farther along in the course of the disease -- and thus at greater risk of death themselves -- every one of them could have infected dozens or even hundreds of other people in the meantime, accelerating the spread of the epidemic.
"Worse: America's underfunded public health system might have taken several days to piece together the whole picture of an epidemic; and perhaps another week or two might have passed before the E. Coli conservatives in charge (having thrown out the science-based management plans thoughtfully developed by the bureaucracy) cooked up some kind of half-assed ideology-driven decision about how to proceed. (It would, of course, involve spectacular amounts of lying to the public.) By that point, tens of millions could have been infected, leading to a death toll that would make 9/11 and Katrina look like minor statistical blips."
In the United States, private corporate controlled health care has been an utter failure and has cost countless lives, while in countries like Canada, everyone has access to quality, affordable, single payer health care and health providers still make good money.
As Sara Robinson says: " [privatized health care] was a colossally expensive national disaster that's denying full coverage to a third of the country --- and putting our health, competitiveness, financial and social capital, and national security at risk in the process. It's also devastating the aspirations of our entire middle class, which is being hollowed out by our current health policies.
"A famous Hebrew prophet once advised his followers to take the log out of their own eyes before trying to remove the splinter from someone else's. As much as it hurts American pride to admit it, Canada and the rest of the industrialized world has us roundly beat on this one."
Obama and Clinton listen up. It's the 21st century. The time is now for Medicare for All, H. R. 676. No excuses.
At Campaign For America's Future, there is an excellent two part series, "Mythbusting Canadian Healthcare Part 1 and Part II" by Sara Robinson, who begins the series with this, "I'm both a health-care-card-carrying Canadian resident and an uninsured American citizen who regularly sees doctors on both sides of the border. As such, I'm in a unique position to address the pros and cons of both systems first-hand. If we're going to have this conversation, it would be great if we could start out (for once) with actual facts, instead of ideological posturing, wishful thinking, hearsay, and random guessing about how things get done up here."
In Part I she debunks 10 common lies that Republicans, especially right wing Bushites use to scare people in the United States. For example:
"Canada's health care system is "socialized medicine."
False. In socialized medical systems, the doctors work directly for the state. In Canada (and many other countries with universal care), doctors run their own private practices, just like they do in the US. The only difference is that every doctor deals with one insurer, instead of 150. And that insurer is the provincial government, which is accountable to the legislature and the voters if the quality of coverage is allowed to slide.
"You don't get to choose your own doctor.
Scurrilously False. Somebody, somewhere, is getting paid a lot of money to make this kind of stuff up. The cons love to scare the kids with stories about the government picking your doctor for you, and you don't get a choice. Be afraid! Be very afraid!
"
For the record: Canadians pick their own doctors, just like Americans do. And not only that: since it all pays the same, poor Canadians have exactly the same access to the country's top specialists that rich ones do."
For the record: Canadians pick their own doctors, just like Americans do. And not only that: since it all pays the same, poor Canadians have exactly the same access to the country's top specialists that rich ones do."
In Part II, Robinson, debunks the free marketeers, Republican Bushite corporate "health care" tycoons who want to maintain the horrendous status quo in the US......raking in billions in profit while regular working Americans must pay increasingly unaffordable costs for health care, even with workplace coverage, not counting those 50 million and rising who have no coverage at all because even the basics are too expensive.
She skewers the Republicans' canard that government run health care is inherently less efficient:
"America spends about 15% of its GDP on health care. Most other industrialized countries (all of whom have some form of universal care) spend about 11-12%. According to the WHO, Canada spends a bit over 9% -- and most of the problems within their system come out of the fact that it's chronically underfunded compared to the international average.
"Any system that has people spending more and getting less is, by definition, not efficient. And these efficiency leaks are, almost entirely, due to private greed. There is no logical way that a private system can pay eight-figure CEO compensation packages, turn a handsome a profit for shareholders, and still be "efficient." In fact, in order to deliver those profits and salaries, the American system has built up a vast, Kafkaesque administrative machinery of approval, denial, and fraud management, which inflates the US system's administrative costs to well over double that seen in other countries -- or even in our own public systems, including Medicare and the VA system."
The irony is that Bush and his administration flunkies and Republican Congressional anti-universal health care puppets disparage and lie about Canadian and other countries' universal, single payer health care, they are covered by government health care; Bush's have's and have mores are rich enough to get expensive health care.
It's the rest of us regular hardworking Americans who are on our own; millions of us struggling to pay for health care; millions having to weigh feeding their children or paying for a doctor's visit; and 18,000 dying each year in the US because of lack of health care coverage.
Robinson then delivers a one-two punch:
"We have more important matters to tend to -- like national security and the war. Getting everyone insured is, unequivocally, a clear matter of national security.
"Our every-man-for-himself attitude toward health care is a security threat on a par with unsecured ports. In Canada, people go see the doctor if they're sick for more than a day or two. It was this easy access to early treatment, along with the much tighter public health matrix that enables doctors to share information quickly, that allowed the country's health care system to detect the 2003 SARS epidemics in Toronto and Vancouver while they were still very localized, act within hours to stop them before the disease spread any further, and track down and treat exposed people before they got too sick to be helped. In both cases, the system worked flawlessly. The epidemic was stopped within days and quashed entirely in under a month, potentially saving of millions of lives.
"In the U.S., that same epidemic might easily have gone unnoticed for critical days and weeks. If the first people to get sick were among those 75 million without adequate insurance, they probably would have toughed it out a few extra days before finally dragging their half-dead carcasses into an ER somewhere. Not only would they be much farther along in the course of the disease -- and thus at greater risk of death themselves -- every one of them could have infected dozens or even hundreds of other people in the meantime, accelerating the spread of the epidemic.
"Worse: America's underfunded public health system might have taken several days to piece together the whole picture of an epidemic; and perhaps another week or two might have passed before the E. Coli conservatives in charge (having thrown out the science-based management plans thoughtfully developed by the bureaucracy) cooked up some kind of half-assed ideology-driven decision about how to proceed. (It would, of course, involve spectacular amounts of lying to the public.) By that point, tens of millions could have been infected, leading to a death toll that would make 9/11 and Katrina look like minor statistical blips."
In the United States, private corporate controlled health care has been an utter failure and has cost countless lives, while in countries like Canada, everyone has access to quality, affordable, single payer health care and health providers still make good money.
As Sara Robinson says: " [privatized health care] was a colossally expensive national disaster that's denying full coverage to a third of the country --- and putting our health, competitiveness, financial and social capital, and national security at risk in the process. It's also devastating the aspirations of our entire middle class, which is being hollowed out by our current health policies.
"A famous Hebrew prophet once advised his followers to take the log out of their own eyes before trying to remove the splinter from someone else's. As much as it hurts American pride to admit it, Canada and the rest of the industrialized world has us roundly beat on this one."
Obama and Clinton listen up. It's the 21st century. The time is now for Medicare for All, H. R. 676. No excuses.
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