When Sen. Ted Kennedy says that he wants working families to receive the same level of health care coverage as "member's of Congress provide for themselves", does that include and-picking the best doctors in the nation? That's what Sen. Kennedy did today after his recent diagnosis with malignant brain tumor two weeks ago. According to the Boston Globe, "Kennedy and his family conferred with a constellation of top national cancer specialists" and chose Duke University's Dr. Allan H. Friedman. While Sen. Kennedy is recovering from his successful surgery, I have to wonder about the kind of treatment he would be able to receive under socialized medicine.
In the UK, who has had socialized medicine in some form for 60 years, the average wait time for a CT Scan would be about two and a half weeks. For a MRI, it's 7 1/2 weeks. In Canada the wait times average more than 4 weeks for a CT Scan. So, two of the countries that are often lauded for their "public health care", it would take from 2 weeks to a month to get a CT Scan to diagnose a Glioma. In contrast, a listing of Chicago area imaging services (MRI, CT, Ultrasound, etc) shows most businesses making claims of no more than 48 hours to get your appointment. This is just for one of the first steps in diagnosis of the tumor. The Fraser Institute reports average wait times of 18 weeks in Canada for "non-emergency" surgery. Sen. Kennedy waited less than two weeks.
While this is just one portion of the entire debate, it's easy to see that perhaps the ideal of "health care for all" is not as great as it sounds. Although almost 16% of American's lack health coverage, the average American is waiting 1/14th of the wait time of the average Canadian, where everyone is covered. It is because of our lack of a publicly funded health care system that we have this much quicker response, not despite it. For the vast majority of Americans that are covered by health care providers, we can already enjoy much the same level of service that Sen. Kennedy does. While we probably lack the resources to pick the best doctors in the country like Ted did, we still get a much higher level of service than our neighbors to the north, who deal with many hardships in trying to get services that we can take advantage of because they are practically forced to use the government's system.
While I mostly oppose government entitlement programs, such as one that would give health care access to the 16% of the population that lacks it, I can understand why people consider this to be a "basic need". However, I would be much more comfortable with a plan that helped those people get access to a private insurer, rather than forcing the entire country into a public one. One of the things that makes our health care, and our country for that matter, so great is the abundance of competition and the freedom of choice. When the government gets involved in health care, as it happens when it gets involved in anything, the available choices are likely to decrease. The government will inevitably be forced to cut the quality of health care that the top 10% are receiving in order to subsidize the quality that the lowest 16% receive. It also brings weight to the liberty-crushing argument that if the government is "paying" for your health care, then the government has the authority to force you to live a more healthy life.
I believe in the power of money as a great equalizer. It doesn't matter who you are, what you do, or what you look like; if you have money, you can get service. A free economy provides ample opportunities for people to get more money, be it through loans, charities, working harder or smarter, etc. By taking things like health care out of the realm of money, the only currency available to improve the quality of your services received is clout. You can't get a clout loan, or a clout job. You can't wash cars in parking lots with your church group to gain more clout. This means that people like Senator Kennedy will continue getting the best services in the country, while the people at the bottom edge of the clout spectrum, which I bet are the same who are uninsured now, will continue to get the worst.
Monday, June 02, 2008
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8 comments:
The stats you gave seem to me to be sort of picked out; I mean if one looked at statistics across the board of different aspects of healthcare the spreat between public and private would probably not be -as- great. Especially if context such as the economic conditions of the country, the health of the population (due to cultural eating habbits or whatever) , etc. were considered. I mean I'm with you on this issue but I don't like to see statistics used as "argument ammo"; because I think that usually misrepresents the issue. For example I'm sure Micheal Moore had just as convincing stats in his healthcare movie.
The reason I used the CT scan is because according to the American Cancer association, that is the first step to determining whether you have this particular form of cancer, after your doctors visit. I originally intended to do a more point-by-point comparison of the different stages, but I realized that would be a much longer article than what is suited for a blog.
However in the case of the UK numbers, they come straight from the UK's Department of Health, who for the first time in 58 years published numbers in 2006. The Canadian numbers come from the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think tank. I was surprised that the British would actually publish official numbers, since governments don't usually like to advertise how poorly their policies have performed.
Anyway, I get your point, and it is well taken, but at the same time, I think that my point was made well enough to the extent I needed to make it. The approach of someone in favor of "public health care" would be to focus on the bottom 16%, find a sob story, and explain how this would not have happened in a socialized state, and that despite the waiting, that person was better off. I understand the argument, but I disagree with what is for the most part the foregone conclusion that in order to achieve "health justice" for the bottom 10%, you have to sacrifice it for the top 90%, and that this is necessary and acceptable.
In this I agree with Ayn Rand's philosophy that the mark of a just society is how it treats not only its weakest members, but also it's strongest. Punishing the top 90% to help the lowest 10% hardly seems just to me.
Dude I have gotten several MRI's over the past 8 months...
the longest I had to wait was 24 hours, the shortest was about 3 minutes (the time it took me to get to the MRI place after being referred from the doc).
Although, the cost of each MRI was an average of $1800... not to mention seeing the doc before hand ($300).
Roughly I learned that a broken bone will cost no less than $30,000 when it all said and done.
Good thing my insurance is awesome or I would likely never have walked normally again.
Socialized medicine would be cool... if I wasn't so damned priviliged.
I also wonder if you can say that the availability in a public system in comparison with the availability in private system might have an effect. Do you see any numbers to suggest that people here that need ct scans avoid them due to cost thus lowering demand and wait times. I also believe that access to a private provider of some sort is the way to go, but I do believe that the government needs to do something about stream lining our system since doctors and hospitals complain that so much of their cost is generated due to them dealing with the different systems all the insurers use. Here is a stat for Kai, I heard that dealing with that issue raises cost to the customer by 60%.
Can you even imagine what the cost would be while dealing with the government?
The availability of service will inevitably be higher in a privatized system, as business owners will have an incentive to provide the services whereas the government has no accountability and nothing to lose by shitty service. In fact, poor service from a government office can be used as an excuse to increase funding. The clearest example of this is public schools where failure is rewarded by increased funding.
I thought maybe you got them from some blog, who's writer got them from some blog who's writer got them from O'Riley factor or something like that; but I stand corrected. I have always thought public health care is a terrible idea, having grown up in a post communist country, but I didn't think that a modern responsible government such as the UK or Canada would be quite so bad at implementing it.
Are you arguing that the bottom 16% of the population not receiving proper medical care is worth the top 84% having shorter wait times on medical care? Unless you can provide some support that the shortened wait times would result in better overall healthcare for the entire population, rather than simply trading the bottom 16%'s health for quicker service for the rest of the population, I'll have to assume you simply value the discomfort of the many over the health of the few.
To look at it drastically and quantitatively, I want you to support this argument by showing that lack of proper healthcare for the bottom 16% results in fewer fatalities or disabilities than the entire population receiving proper healthcare with longer wait times.
I'm primarily arguing that it's not the governments decision to make either way.
If I wanted to approach this from a pure numbers perspective, I would do a comparitive analysis of the quantifiable data of 1. Loss of life between the two systems, and 2. The overall cost to society. To me the first one is not clear cut, i.e. How many people are dying because it takes them 18 weeks to get surgery, vs how many people are dying because they don't have insurance. I doubt that these numbers would be easy to find, but that's what I would look for.
For the second case, I would want to know how much more it costs per person in lost wages, unemployment stipends, temporary care, et cetera to maintain a 4 month turnover rate for 100% of Canadians, vs the same numbers for the 16% of uninsured Americans. I have a feeling that the overall costs of "national healthcare" are much more than it would be to insure those 16%, just because of these factors.
The point being, its not just a matter of "comfort". In the US we provide emergency health services for all our citizens, regardless of income, its the non-emergency things that we do so far and beyond the quality of that available in the UK and Canada that I would not be willing to sacrifice and that I don't think it's reasonable or acceptable to ask 84% of Americans to give up.
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