August 21, 2009

• Universal Health Care

  Looking at health care from the individual's standpoint; I think most if not all of us would like our health problems treated as promptly as possible at the lowest cost to us by the most competent physicians available.
  To be sure, some religions direct health care toward different practitioners or religious guides, but I think even the most devout Christian Scientist would get a broken arm set and splinted.
  Traditionally, here in the US we have, for the most part, turned to private practitioners for our doctoring. Unfortunately, the dream of an old family doctor with his little black bag, was obsolete many decades ago. Modern medicine requires complicated technology - which won't fit in that bag; and an esoteric skill set far beyond the dreams of that old family doctor of our great grandparents (that YOUR GGparents - I actually remember him - most of his patients died quicker than they do now).
  The medical business is now a gigantic enterprise which most developed nations have learned to deal with in a business-like manner. Just as government seldom encourages individuals to build roads or battleships or recruit their own armies, so they have taken over the business of health care, deciding sensibly that allowing some to get rich on the backs of others sickness and misery is bad politics.
  We Americans, however, have allowed, even encouraged, such a situation and stuck with it despite the pain and suffering - both physical and financial - it has caused a growing number of our fellow citizens. A lucky few of us have the benefits of government run health care. Of course such a system has all the bureaucratic disadvantages of any such hugh system, but remarkably at the patient-doctor beginning of the chain,there are few problems and much satisfaction.
  Do you know anyone who has abandoned Medicare after trying it for a few years? It isn't mandatory, you know - you have to sign up for it and agree to have the modest monthly payment taken out of your social security or other retirement check. You can, if you wish, continue to make private arrangements.
  My point is, of course, that our present system is unsustainable and must be changed. The obvious change is to move to a system where we have absolute control over the system and its administration - which we would have in a government - run single payer system. We do still have the political power of the world's greatest democracy .
  Many physicians have indicated that they would prefer to be salaried employees, but I think such a system would work better if they remained private (as in Canada) and accepted fees for their services.
  I think a part of any good health care system would be active recruitment of the "best and brightest" with scholarships to medical, nursing, and med-tech schools and the guarantee of jobs on graduation.
  How would such a utopian system be financed - by taxes of course. The total should be lower that the present for-profit system costs us even insuring all those who presently are unable or unwilling to carry health insurance. Such a system is pretty popular in every other country that's tried it.

  • 2:43 pm
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