The debate on healthcare reform

Four speakers present their views on a single-payer plan

View/listen—then comment below.

True healthcare reform will have to involve some form of government-sponsored health insurance. The current system, as those of us who have watched the Wendell Potter interview already know, simply allows insurance companies to cherry pick their subscribers, allowing them to collect $30 billion in profits annually.

Yet Americans have been told for decades that so-called “nationalized medicine” is wrong and will lead to healthcare rationing and long lines at doctors’s offices and clinics. You simply won’t be able to get health care anymore, we are told.

Well, for almost 50 million people, that is the reality already. Prices for pharmaceuticals are far higher here than they are for the same drugs in other countries. Many Americans would love to be able to purchase their drugs from Canadian pharmacies, for example. (Many do, but not legally.)

Doctors may be ready

One of the surprises for us in watching the videos below was the statement that most doctors are ready for universal health care, even perhaps eager for it. Yet, when we think about it, that makes sense. Doctors have to deal with the health insurance mess on a daily basis. For them, having to deal with a single set of standards would probably be a blessed relief.

The truth is that while we are constantly told of the horrors of having a government bureaucracy standing between us and our doctors, the current system gives us an arbitrary set of rules established for the benefit of only one group—insurance company stockholders and executives. Insurance-industry executive salaries are what they are (around $14 million annually, on average—some astoundingly higher) because of the tremendous profits in health insurance.

Whether we realize it or not, we currently have a huge insurance-industry bureaucracy standing between us and our healthcare. And the motivation of that industry is purely profit, not our welfare.

We are constantly told that Americans have the best healthcare system (and health care) in the world. In fact, Americans rank 30th in life expectancy1 and the latest figures we can find from the CDC rank us 27th in infant mortality. (The CIA Factbook, on the other hand, ranks the U.S. 180th for infant mortality—apparently the CIA has a lower opinion of U.S. healthcare than the UN.) What’s worse, the U.S. infant mortality figures have gotten steadily worse for at least two decades, placing us steadily further behind those countries with the best ranking.

American health care the most expensive

So, what Americans really have is the most expensive health care in the world ($7,421 per person in 2007, according to Kaiser Health2). A lot of that excess expense goes to insurance premiums, excessive drug and medical device prices, and yes, even for unnecessary tests and procedures.

We also don’t buy the notion, as some of the more enthusiastic Democrats will tell you, that Medicare as it stands is a wonderful system. In fact, Congress weakened that system considerably several years ago when it began requiring retirees to use a significant portion of their already too-limited social security to pay for prescriptions. Medicare needs a lot of cleaning up, in our opinion.

But one of the clear advantages of a single-payer system is that everyone is covered by the same insurance plan. That puts considerable pressure on the insurer (in this case, the government) to provide satisfactory service and coverage. If members of Congress were required to use the same healthcare system as the rest of us, you can rest assured that the healthcare system would be in good shape. Then we really would have the best in the world.

Watch the videos below and form your own opinion. Be sure to share that opinion with us in the newly revised Comments area below.

After you’re done viewing the videos, listen to the NPR report on how the pharmaceutical companies have spent over $40 million in just three months to fight health care reform by clicking here.

And to see how the California Nurses Association views these same issues, go here.


Dr. David Himmelstein, June 3, 2009, Dirksen Senate Office Building Washington, DC

Dr. David Himmelstein is associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and serves as the chief of the Division of Social and Community Medicine at Cambridge Hospital where he practices primary care internal medicine. He received his M.D. from Columbia University and completed internal medicine training at Highland Hospital/University of California San Francisco, and a fellowship in general internal medicine at Harvard.

Dr. Himmelstein was a founder of Physicians for a National Health Program and serves as co-director of the Center for National Health Program Studies at the Cambridge Hospital/Harvard Medical School. He co-edits PNHP’s newsletter and is a principal author of PNHP articles published in the JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine in conjunction with Dr. Steffie Woolhandler.

YouTube Preview Image

Howard Dean — May 8, 2009



Dennis Kucinich on single-payer care, June 30, 2009



Eric Massa and others (pro and con) on single-payer care, around June 16, 2009

  1. The CIA Factbook ranks the U.S. 30th in life expectancy. United Nations estimates rank the U.S. 38th in life expectancy. ↩
  2. http://www.kaiseredu.org/topics_im.asp?imID=1&parentID=61&id=358, accessed August 3, 2009 ↩

This entry is filed under health insurance. You can follow any comments for this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

You can leave a comment here, or a trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “The debate on healthcare reform”

  1. Redcoat Says:
    August 3rd, 2009 at 4:00 pm

    I agree that single payer is the only realistic option.

    The Republicans keep whining about how important health-care decisions would be made by faceless Federal bureaucrats instead of by doctors. But how is that worse than decisions made by greedy insurance company bean counters?

    All the other industrialized countries (plus some non-industrialized countries such as Costa Rica, Cuba and Kuwait) have universal health care. And the people in those countries all have greater life expectancies and lower infant mortalities than the U.S.

    But the politicians in this country (all the Republicans and half the Democrats) have been bought off by large contributions from the insurance companies. And the rest of the Democrats have been bought off by ambulance-chasing sheisters.

    So far as I’m concerned, Obama’s program sucks precisely because he doesn’t try to put the insurance companies out of business. Instead, he’s going to let them run it just like the Republicans did (with Medicare D, etc.).

    So that means health care costs will continue to soar, and the government will just keep funneling more money to the insurance companies so that their executives can steal the money and get rich!

    When Medicare-D was introduced by the Bush league, my insurance company (Health Net) increased my premium and cut my benefits (they no longer pay for eyeglasses, hearing aids or dental care, and their copayments for generic drugs are higher than the cash price for those drugs at Costco, Walmart or Walgreen’s).

    The last statement I got from Health Net showed that I had paid over $200 out of pocket for drugs this year, while Health Net had paid a grand total of $8.00.

    The way insurance is supposed to work is that the premiums of low-risk patients subsidize the costs for high-risk patients. Instead, the insurance companies dumped the highest risk people (babies, disabled veterans and senior citizens) onto the government Medicare and Medicaid programs. Meanwhile, the insurance companies kept the low-risk people (healthy people with good jobs) and charged them sky-high premiums.

    So if we had universal health care, we would have a genuine insurance system for the first time!

    It should actually cost the government less because the low-risk people would be subsidizing the high-risk people the government is paying out for. Right now, the insurance companies don’t even want to pay for the sick patients they do have on their rolls.

    What’s more, if somebody is forced to change jobs, their new insurance company refuses to cover their “pre-existing conditions.”

    It’s a disgrace!

  2. Bill Suydam Says:
    August 7th, 2009 at 6:14 pm

    There is some irony in your statement about the “non-industrialized” countries Cuba, Costa Rica and Kuwait having universal health care.

    If you look at the World Health Organization’s ranking of nations by the quality of their health care systems, the U.S. ranks 37th—that’s just behind Costa Rica and ahead of Slovenia, which is followed by Cuba. So despite Cuba’s being an impoverished nation that the U.S. has boycotted economically for decades, it ranks only slightly behind the U.S. in the quality of its health care.

    However, if you use the more closely watched infant mortality statistic, things look much worse. The CIA actually rates the U.S. 180th in infant mortality, which is just one ranking better than Cuba, although the CIA data shows 5.82 deaths per 1,000 live births for Cuba vs. 6.26 for the United States. Not sure why the CIA ranks the U.S. ahead of Cuba for infant mortality.

    Kuwait, by the way, ranks 45th for overall health and 159th for infant mortality. The latter statistic puts it just one notch ahead of Costa Rica (and way ahead of the U.S.).

  3. Bill Suydam Says:
    August 13th, 2009 at 12:32 pm

    Actually, I mis-spoke in the above comment. The CIA ranks the U.S. 180th in infant mortality, that is true. But the ranking is from best (#224, Singapore) to worst (#1, Angola). That means the U.S. ranks one slot BEHIND Cuba, but ahead of Costa Rica and Kuwait. In effect, the CIA ranks the U.S. 44th in infant mortality (224 – 180 = 44).

Leave a Comment





Your comment is formatted in XHTML, so you can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Close

Add video comment