'Medicare for All' would cure health care crisis
By Saul Friedman
Newsday
December 3, 2005
Where were we? Oh, yes. I was saying last week that it’s about time we joined the rest of the civilized and industrialized world in providing publicly financed, universal health care for the American people and their families. But I didn’t say why or how.
After all, the United States has some of the finest, most modern medical facilities in the world. I ought to know; Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Medical Center saved my life.
Nearby, the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health, outside Washington, D.C., set the standards for American research. And patients come from abroad seeking help from many U.S. hospitals.
If you don’t have a life-threatening illness, you won’t have to wait weeks, as you might in Canada or Britain, for elective surgery on those cataracts or to repair a hernia - if you have the right insurance.
Ah, there’s the rub for nearly 46 million Americans (including 9 million children) who have no insurance. For a hacking cough bordering on pneumonia, they wait in crowded clinics or go without care. Caring for a child burning up with fever can be frightening enough, with insurance; being uninsured can end up killing that child.
A Florida study found that children who enter a hospital without insurance are more than twice as likely to die as children with insurance. Another study reported that 18,000 Americans die each year because they are uninsured.
Millions more Americans are underinsured or find that their insurance doesn’t cover what they thought. In the United States, administrative costs amount to 25 percent of health care spending, or $300 billion a year, says economics columnist Paul Krugman, partly because the huge bureaucracy is engaged in denying care to those who most need it. The rest of those costs are profits.
According to The New York Times, many of the non-Medicare insured go broke trying to keep up with co-pays for chronic illness or the bills from hospitals, for the room, surgeons, labs, anesthetists, drugs and any other white coat that drops in. A third of American patients spend more than $1,000 a year out of pocket, and 68 percent of those who declared bankruptcy because of medical bills had insurance.
The Washington Post reported weeks ago that the Blue Shield HMO in California, to save money for the company and patients, is sending members from the San Diego area to Mexico for nonemergency care because services are less expensive than in the United States.
A doctor, who performs laser eye surgery on both sides of the border, told the Post he charges in Mexico a third of what he charges in San Diego. A hysterectomy that averages $2,025 in the United States costs $810 in Mexico. Blue Shield said the services on both sides of the border are comparable. And in Mexico the doctors’ parking lots are filled with California cars.
The United States spends more than any nation on health: $5,600 for every American, or 14.6 percent of national income, compared with Germany, 10.9 percent; Canada, 9.6 percent; New Zealand, 8.5 percent; and Britain, 7.7 percent. Yet a recent study for the private, nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund, which surveyed 7,000 of the sickest patients in Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Britain and the United States, found that American medicine has the highest error rates, the most fragmented and disorganized care and highest costs.
Are we getting our money’s worth?
Infant mortality - the number of deaths of children under one year, probably the best measure of the level of health of any country - actually increased from 6.6 to 7 per thousand live U.S. births. That’s higher than 41 nations, including Italy (6.07), Canada (4.82), Germany (4.2) and Japan, which has the lowest rate in the world at 3.28. The percentage of live births classified as low birth weight, an indication of the mother’s health and prenatal care, is 7.8 percent for the United States, behind Canada (5.6), the Netherlands (4.7), Australia (6.2) and all of Europe.
The United States boasts a life expectancy for men of 77.3 years, but we’re behind 34 other nations, including New Zealand (79), Germany (79), Britain (79), Canada (80), Australia (81) and Japan (82). Need I add that all these countries provide universal health care - the ability to walk into a doctor’s office without worrying about cost? What are we waiting for?
Polls indicate most Americans (75 percent) would support universal health care. And leading newspapers, commentators, economists, lawmakers, 13,000 doctors, former surgeons general, businessmen and a few conservatives have come to the same, obvious conclusion: If we were to pay in taxes just a fraction of what health care now costs us, we could afford it.
But universal health care is much easier said than done. How to deal with the entrenched insurance-medical-hospital complex? How to make the transition relatively painless for medical professionals and patients?
The answer is also obvious: Medicare for every American, or what I proposed years ago, “Medicare for All.” A distinguished panel of health care experts, Democrats, Republicans, financiers, insurance executives and academics concluded in an open letter to the journal Health Affairs, that Medicare must be empowered as the vehicle “to make pay-for-performance a national strategy for better quality.” Lawmakers, medical journals, a couple of former surgeons general and 13,000 doctors have proposed phasing in “Medicare for All.”
And if this administration doesn’t trash the rest of Medicare before it leaves the scene, it remains the most obvious, affordable and doable way to providing universal coverage.
WRITE TO Saul Friedman, Newsday, 235 Pinelawn Rd., Melville, NY 11747-4250, or by e-mail at saulfriedman@comcast.net.
Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc.
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