Rationing Seniors Health Care So Greedy, For Profit, Private Health Insurance Companies Make More $$$$$
His article on rationing health care to seniors sounds suspiciously like the view that older people with health issues should be rounded up and put on an ice floe to die in order to decrease the aging population and increase the profits of private health care insurance.
Guess Dr. Brown hasn't heard about other industrialized countries' health care coverage putting the US to shame, like life expectancies in US being lower than in those countries with single-payer, government administered universal health care.
Unlike the US, most other industrialized countries have single payer, universal health care as a right and provide the same or better health care to all, including the elderly, more economically.
James Galloway writes at Mother Jones: "the implicit solution is clear--if not from the article itself, then from its placement alongside Craig Bowron's piece on the tormented lives of the chronically ill elderly. The obvious way to slow our progress toward economic and social destruction is for old folks to stop having all those expensive interventions and just give up the ghost. And if the geezers won’t make the decision to do this voluntarily--well, then, society might have to make it for them.
"In blog for the American Prospect, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research lays out why the underlying terms of this debate are fatally flawed. Criticizing David Brown’s Post piece for “telling readers that there is nothing we can do about health care costs,” Baker writes:
Remarkably, this lengthy column never once notes the fact that the United States pays more than twice as much per person for health care than the average of the other wealthy countries, all of whom enjoy longer life expectancies.
This is a hard to overlook piece of evidence suggesting that the United States could do a great deal to lower its health care costs. Among other things, we have a hugely wasteful insurance system (noted in the column), pay close to twice as much for prescription drugs as people in other wealthy countries, and pay our medical specialists close to twice as much as they earn in other wealthy countries.
Overpaying for drug and doctors not only directly wastes money by causing us to pay more for the same services. The huge rents created by these over-payments leads drug companies and specialists to find ways to promote excessive use of their products and services. The result is really bad and really expensive medicine.
"Studies comparing health care in the United States and other industrialized countries--including those conducted by the World Health Organization, Congressional Research Service,Kaiser Family Foundation, and Commonwealth Fund--consistently find dramatically higher spending in the U.S. (both per capita and as a percentage of GDP), and poorer performance on a host of important health measures, from life expectancy to infant mortality to medical errors. All of these other countries, of course, have public single-payer health care systems, while we have medicine for profit.
Shame on you David Brown. And you call yourself a physician.
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