The latest on single payer

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:"

"But, as usual, corporate mass media is lying through its bleached teeth. If that vision of health care hell were true, all other Western democracies would exhibit shorter average life spans, higher rates of cancer and heart disease, higher infant mortality rates, lower birth weights, fewer average healthy years, failing mental health programs and far more serious epidemiological incidents than does the US. Since the opposite is true in all cases, it seems fair to conclude that single-payer, universal-access works, this cobbled together disaster we call a health care system is not getting the job done and that we're being ill served by US media yet again."

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.)

Comments

[Willy]

"Just Published?"

That article is 6 years old!

[Terry]

My mistake, Willy. It's been corrected.

The other stuff is recent, however. (Well, relatively recent. Pease published his piece a year ago.)

[Harry Kershner]

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.)