National healthcare makes sense both economically and morally. Most Americans believe that all citizens have a fundamental right to adequate medical care. The few that don't, for whatever reason, should just focus on the bottom line. And the bottom line is this:
The greatest burden on American business is not the cost of labor. Nor is it competition from overseas. It's the sharply rising cost of employer-based healthcare benefits. And by business, I mean the public service sector, like education, as well as privately owned industrial and retail enterprises. If the federal government relieved employers of the obligation to provide healthcare for workers, business would boom. And the citizenry would be better served.
Why hasn't it happened here as it has in other western industrial societies? That's a question you can begin answering by reading this article from the August edition of the New Yorker. Here's the key section:
"One of the great mysteries of political life in the United States is why Americans are so devoted to their health-care system. Six times in the past century—during the First World War, during the Depression, during the Truman and Johnson Administrations, in the Senate in the nineteen-seventies, and during the Clinton years—efforts have been made to introduce some kind of universal health insurance, and each time the efforts have been rejected. Instead, the United States has opted for a makeshift system of increasing complexity and dysfunction. Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and half times the industrialized world’s median of $2,193; the extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
"What does that extra spending buy us? Americans have fewer doctors per capita than most Western countries. We go to the doctor less than people in other Western countries. We get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other Western countries. We are less satisfied with our health care than our counterparts in other countries. American life expectancy is lower than the Western average. Childhood-immunization rates in the United States are lower than average. Infant-mortality rates are in the nineteenth percentile of industrialized nations. Doctors here perform more high-end medical procedures, such as coronary angioplasties, than in other countries, but most of the wealthier Western countries have more CT scanners than the United States does, and Switzerland, Japan, Austria, and Finland all have more MRI machines per capita.
"Nor is our system more efficient. The United States spends more than a thousand dollars per capita per year—or close to four hundred billion dollars—on health-care-related paperwork and administration, whereas Canada, for example, spends only about three hundred dollars per capita. And, of course, every other country in the industrialized world insures all its citizens; despite those extra hundreds of billions of dollars we spend each year, we leave forty-five million people without any insurance. A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy—a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were five cents cheaper—has loyally stuck with a health-care system that leaves its citizenry pulling out their teeth with pliers."
It's no wonder that Wal-Mart, a supposedly efficient mega-retailer, is doing its damnedest to cut employee heatlhcare costs. Those same costs are also the reason public school teachers are willing to walk off the job when bargaining with districts reaches an impasse.
I'm sure I'll hear the argument from the free market anti-government crowd that this country has the "greatest economy" the world has ever seen. Why jeopardize it with the immense costs of "socialized medicine"? Here's my preemptive response:
No economy can be called "great" that leaves a quarter of its citizens in poverty. The health of an economy can only be judged by the health of the people it supposedly serves.
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