Part II – Socialized Medicine?

I can’t believe how weak the health care reform bill from the House appears to be. For starters, it leaves at least 10 million people uninsured. It has totally ignored the concept of cutting costs by cutting out the billions we spend on billing 1900 different insurance companies.

The well-funded special interests (“stakeholders” is the new politically correct euphemism!) who are working so hard to prevent a single-payer health program for America want you to believe a whole lot of lies and misinformation. “American’s want to preserve their freedom to choose their insurance company.” Ha! We want the freedom to choose our caregivers and treatment, as we discussed in the previous posting.

We want to choose to PREVENT disease, and get insurance coverage for the programs that will help us do so. Very few insurance companies make this a priority. We had to fight for years to get mammograms and colonoscopies covered. Birth control isn’t covered – but Viagra is!

With a single payer system, would you have to wait forever for appointments and elective surgery? If you check the COMPLETE statistics (not the cherry-picked isolated cases) from countries like Canada, Australia, France, Denmark, Germany and others, you’ll see: absolutely not. At least not more than you already do. Try to get an ablation on your atrial fibrillating heart right now – you’re looking at four to six months here in South Carolina. Need your knees replaced by the orthopedics specialist you believe to be the best? Plan on several months on the waiting list. Will that get better with a single-payer system? No guarantees, but it won’t get worse. And if you show up in an emergency room with severe stomach pain, you won’t be waiting in line behind all those uninsured folks who have only the emergency room to seek treatment for their kid’s ear ache (which is probably much worse than it would have been if they’d seen a family physician two weeks ago when it started, but they couldn’t because they couldn’t afford it!).

What would we give up with a single payer system? Lots of jobs in the insurance industry. Lots and lots. High paying jobs. Really high paying jobs for the executives. Nearly 2 Billion for one United Health Care CEO. We won’t have to pay for those industry bureaucrats anymore.

Lots of jobs in the lobbying industry. High paying jobs. People who put money in the campaign chests of our representatives. Millions and millions of dollars. We won’t have to pay for that anymore.

That might upset those Senators and Congresspersons who currently take millions and millions from those lobbyists. Please see the website cited in the last posting to see some of the Democrats who answer this description. (http://vote.wewantthepublicoption.com)

In a single payer system, all of our premiums will go to a system that is modeled after Medicare. It works. Medicare only uses 3% of its budget for administration. The typical health insurance company spends about 33% of your premium for administration. I’m sure your imagination will suggest some of the ways they waste that money on unnecessary expenses, like office space in high-priced neighborhoods, leather desk chairs, “customer service” representatives whose job it is to find a way to deny a claim, corporate jets for the CEOs, annual meetings in Cancun for the senior managers, etc., etc.

How would we pay for it? Opponents are telling you we can’t afford this “socialized medicine” – but WE ALREADY CAN’T AFFORD THE SYSTEM WE HAVE! In fact, with a single-payer system, we can identify millions – even billions - of dollars of savings over what Americans currently pay (about $500 Billion per year). And the single-payer route is the only version of health care reform that will certainly provide those enormous cost reductions. The money we DON’T pay to health insurance companies will allow us to pay for the public system and put the savings back in our pockets.

Oh, and another thing: the single-payer would be able to bargain for lower prescription drug prices, for everyone. They’d have high volume purchasing power. So your Aunt Hattie wouldn’t have to choose between her heart medicine and groceries.

Socialized medicine indeed. How about medicine whose priority is taking care of the members of our society, not putting money in the pockets of high society?

I’ll put my money into a single-payer system any day. Suppose half of the uninsured gave $1 each to help fund primary opponents of Democrats who backed away from securing good health care for all. $23 million could make a difference, I’m guessing.

Do you think they’d listen to $23 million? Disgusting, isn’t it?

Jacque