More than 47 million Americans have no health insurance; more than half of personal bankruptcies result from medical bills. To learn about solutions to this daunting problem, the Diablo Valley Democratic Club will present “Health Care for Everyone: How Will We Get There?” on Wednesday, March 18, at 7 p.m., at the Ygnacio Valley Library, 2661 Oak Grove Rd., Walnut Creek. Featured speaker is Pat Snyder, Chair, Health Care For All, Contra Costa Chapter, supporting a single payer plan for California. Q & A to follow.
The meeting will also include a vote to endorse a proposed $99 parcel tax for the Mt. Diablo school district.
Information: 925-946-0469 or www.dvdems.org
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Jeannie DeAngelis wrote in American Thinker (Mar 5) It is going to be very interesting to see the reaction of American’s, who are eagerly awaiting single-payer Universal Health Care and who falsely imagine that for “free” they will have the same access and quality they presently enjoy These are same hoodwinked individuals who think they can skip mortgage payments and remain in their homes or overlook lunch tabs but still demand personal size pizzas and Acai-Blueberry-Pomegranate Vitamin Water without charge.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/03/cold_cheese_sandwich_compassio.html
Actually a major section of the Hippocratic Oath related to things other than health care. If you review the Athenian-Spartan War of the time, it is fairly clear that there was no health care for the masses…to the extent that what they did then was something which we could equate Health Care to. Remember that the issue before us was that the Free Market could provide for health care. The Free Market provided no system of care in ancient Athens, provided no level of care in the 1800’s and there is no expectation that it would be any different now.
One of the big shifts that took place in this country in health care is related to the ‘Free Market’: in the 1940’s-50’s a large amount of care was provided by religions whose vows of poverty etc pre-empted the Free Market function, but there was a decidedly determined shift away from that into the ‘Free market’ that led to the situation where government and regulations stepped in. Free Market did not work to provide large scale health care. What we have now is not working either, but a hands off Free Market is a disaster on humanitarian levels everywhere.
For example through most of Africa is there not a Free Market… care to go to Zaire for your health care?
~ EDITOR SIGHS — Edi, I cannot disprove something that doesn’t exist. You keep asking for some government sponsored universal healthcare that works and there are none. If you were a plebe in Athens you paid. That was my point. That was universal healthcare.
The issue is about who is going to pay. Tax subsidy, monopoly payer, insurance, or whatever you can afford.
I tend to disagree strongly… Athens 337BC…really now. That would be just before or after Alexander the Great took it over? I seriously doubt that the mass of the Athenians had health care, you may recall that women were not even citizens in Athens ((oddly enough they had more rights in Sparta)). As an example of distribution of resources, hardly an approach we should apply. CALPERS and Federal Employ plans you call upon… these are hardly examples of the functioning of the Free Market. Quite the opposite. However, if you are advocating that everyone be covered under those plans I am right with you…
~ EDITOR DOCUMENTS WILD CLAIMS — Actually, Hippocrates (460 BC- 370 BC) was Pericles’ physician and figures prominently in the history of clinical medicine and healthcare. In fact, it is a very apt example of total free market where he and his brethren could charge whatever they wanted to anyone that asked for services. At least he had an oath to do no harm, an oath we wished Obama would make.
Blue Cross is an excellent example of the Insurance model of Free Market Deviation. The Federal employee plan is indeed an example of subsidized care and could be used universally as well.
All of which illustrates that many plans are better than one that insists like some spoiled child on some single-payer plan.
Let’s go over this again, and let me ask it more clearly:
Find a place and a time, that has a Free Market medical environment and then show how it is/was
1. superior for all levels of society
2. better care than what we have
~ BGR responds –
The first one I know of was in Athens circa 337 B.C.
More recently there are at least employee- and group-based plans that work well
- Federal Employees Health Benefit Program
- CalPERS
But some would argue these are subsidized systems (see below)
- Blue Cross/BlueShield (more of the Insurance model below)
The question, as I said above, is not about health care qua medicine, but how to best distribute scarce resources.
How we ought to provision health care can happen in a number of ways
- Free Market examples can be simple (charge whatever people are willing to pay) to Insurance (with costs shared over large groups), and Charity (most of the U.S. experience up to the 1880s) tends to push prices higher based on amount of giving to make up difference.
Deviations from Free Market provisioning include: Licensing (creates scarcity which raises prices); Subsidies (Tax policy, grants to health institutions, and I’d argue Tax-Advantaged Individual Health Accounts); Monopoly Customer (MediCare or even collusion of insurance companies) that ineitably forces some Peter to pay for some Paul’s treatment)
And finally, total State monopoly that creates massive spike in demand that absent increased licensing or price inflation for doctors and caregivers results in longer lines and increased taxes for less service
From across this entire spectrum, only the state does not have to do a good job to get money. And that scares me.
You think our schools are bad?
Even if the state spends the money in a lousy, inefficient manner, the money will continue to flow into its coffers becuase people are denied the choice to withhold their money from the state. And bureaucrats and electeds officials will find it easier to ignore the problem v. any possible incentive they might receive to challenge the Post Office to work harder for less.
Instead of SIngle-Payer, I would argue for
- deregulation of medical insurance so that plans could be purchased across state lines to provide more competition and put downward pressure on costs; the object being to remove some middle man (employers, state bureaucracy, insurance company) so that people have health insurance go with them from job to job as former norm of lifelong careers gives way to 2-4 year stints of a more mobile and transient workforce.
- state as insurer of last resort just like it acts in California workers’ Comp. Includes programs to subsidize or assist marginally poor or working poor with premium payments at least for children.
- eliminate barriers to innovation (arguably) not part of the government’s DNA; state regulation is harmful to future patients, and past regulation is harmful to current patients.
The best combination that is superior will be the one that maximizes customer choice and responsibility. Universal Healthcare based on Single-Payer is certainly not the best alternative.
Single-payer is absurd, actually. Using the same argument, single-payer proponents have no reason to deny the State the role of providing food for everyone; deciding what should be grown or slaughtered, how much you get, set the price, and declare where you can buy it and from whom, and when. It is a matter of life and health, just like healthcare.
To say the “free market” does not work for health care once it trickles down from the elite to the masses does not fit the facts.
Sadly, the lack of universal coverage is a serious problem. But let’s not confuse a lack of health insurance with a lack of health care. Single payer advocates point to the uninsured and damn the whole system. It would be more appropriate to conclude that the U.S. health care works very well for most Americans – but that reforms are still needed.
First of all healthcare cannot be free. It is a finitie resource at any given time. Someone has to pay for it. Either thru higher premiums or rationing of care.
Government regulation of health care prohibits me from finding cheaper insurance across state lines. Further regulation that makes “must-cover” policy rules only increases costs instead of letting people of all income ranges find a plan that fits their needs.
As a previous writer posted, a state risk pool can help cover those who truly are neediest.
Just like any healthy organic system it is better to have variety, freedom, and redunancy rather than put all eggs into one gene pool so to speak. For government to insist it provide single payer coverage is not in interest of public health, only growth of government bureaucracy.
In the U.K. the prospects of the poor child with asthma are even scarier under single payer because care will be rationed, not treated, or under treated. A German study shows that in France 9 of 10 asthma patients do not receive adequate care.
Of course, single payer proponents choose to ignore these realities. After all, they see utopia in Canada, and hope for the same. But Government-run health care, however, is anything but utopian. Whether it’s Canada, the U.K., or Germany’s sickness funds, public systems all suffer from similar problems.
Letting people choose is a better prescription than government fiat.
Why does single payer have to be a monopoly?
Where in the world has Free Market Medicine worked to provide the equivalent of the skill and care of what we have as a capacity and able to serve the entire society at a reasonable cost?
When dealing with free-market forces there is an underlining concept of item value.
What value do you think a free market places on an asthma dying child? In a free market the traditional answer: whatever the market may bear, in other words the most that can be taken from the customer.
Is that what we want?
There was a time when a lot of the health care was basically making someone comfortable as they died. The range of what we can do now is so astounding to what even 50 years ago we are able to do and the current costs of that capacity is what is causing the tremendous lack of coverage.
The Free Market really does not have a good track record on providing essentials for life and once health care passed from the realm of the elite to the expectation of everyone it would appear that it is out of the range of Free Market approaches.
To the Editor:
The term “single payer” triggers another term: MONOPOLY.
Monopoly means a single seller.
Think about some other monopolies. There is the United States Postal Service, which used to be a total monopoly until e-mail and companies like Federal Express came along. If you want to send a first class letter, you pay what the Postal Service tells you to pay.
Perhaps you remember when AT&T was a telephone monopoly. Despite some feeble regulation, telephone users paid what the telephone company demanded.
A person’s electrical utility is a monopoly. Something similar is true about a cable television provider. Can a person shop around for a supplier of water for his home? In some cities, garbage collection is carried out by a monopoly.
Medicare, the government plan to provide health care for Americans over age 65 is a monopoly. Medicare is so powerful that it can obtain information on any recipient’s income. Specifically, Medicare has access to the information on any recipient’s Form 1040, the federal income tax form. If, in Medicare’s view, a Medicare recipient has income that’s deemed “too high,” Medicare can automatically raise that recipient’s monthly premium. Morewover, a person rejecting Medicare, loses his Social Security benefits.
Economically speaking, there is nothing more evil than monopoly.
Single-payer health care is nothing more than a monopoly. Like any monopoly, a single-payer system will charge what it wants, reject anyone whom it dislikes, and violate personal privacy. Cost-control will not exist,
What can be said about the 47 million people who have no health insurance? According to a March 2, 2009, report from the Pacfiic Research Institute, 18 million of the uninsured make more than $50,000 a year. The reports states that almost 10 million have annual incomes that exceed $75,000.
Single-payer is not the way to deliver health insurance.
Let the free market provide health care. We use the free market to buy auto insurance. For people who cannot obtain auto insurance, there is the state risk pool.
For people who cannot obtain health incurance, a state risk poll can be established.
Richard S. Colman
Orinda, CA
March 5, 2009
I hope someone asks how the government will create more healthcare. When they say “healthcare for everyone” what they really mean is healthcare rationing for everyone in order to achieve equality of service.
The labor and resources for healthcare cannot be created by legislative fiat. If there’s more demand there must be higher prices, or rationing. The idea that we can have quality, affordable healthcare for all in a single payer or UHC type plan does not hold up under scrutiny.