The founders of Physicians for a National Health Program published a study in the August, 2003 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine contrasting the administrative costs of health care in the United States and Canada.
The results? Total administrative costs covering six categories --for example, insurance overhead, hospital administration, practitioner administrative costs-- for the United States:
$1059 per capita.
For Canada:
$307 per capita
Conclusion?
"...the difference in the costs of health care administration between the United States and Canada is clearly large and growing. Is $294.3 billion annually for U.S. health care administration money well spent?"
Hmmmm. Is the answer .... NO?
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Recently Tim Carpenter of Progressive Democrats of America took on Fox News Channel's Megyn Kelley over the issue of single payer health care. Here's the video:
Fox News, as you would expect, is anti-single payer. Kelly spouts the usual right-wing "talkng points" about long waits in Canada for vital surgeries. Are they true?
Warren Pease responds to the notion that single payer would "result in long waiting lists for
even the most mundane procedures:"
Under the for-profit "disaster" that passes for health care in this country, people, even the ones with health insurance like Nataline Sarkisyan, a 17-year old girl who was denied* a liver transplant by Cigna HealthCare in order "to maximize its profits," actually do die.
*(Cigna did eventually relent, but just hours before young Nataline expired. Good PR for Cigna. Not so good for its client.)
"Just Published?"
That article is 6 years old!
Posted by: Willy | June 01, 2009 at 08:10 AM
My mistake, Willy. It's been corrected.
The other stuff is recent, however. (Well, relatively recent. Pease published his piece a year ago.)
Posted by: Terry | June 01, 2009 at 01:56 PM
Bulletin: Fox News and the other right-wingers have been joined by Obama and the Democrat elites.
Earl (No Ceasefire in Lebanon) Blumenauer is claiming, just as Obama did, that, of course he's in favor of single payer, but it's just not "politically feasible", so he's against it. (Remember when Earl committed to oppose "war supplementals"? That was before it was a Democrat supplemental.)
Posted by: Harry Kershner | June 02, 2009 at 12:52 PM