Health Care

[Caer Rialis]

First, the U.S. doesn't have a crisis in health care; it has a crisis in how to pay for health care. now for my answer.

Okay anyone got any ideas on how to do this?

Yes. A single-payer system.



Everything in your examples points to a single-payer system as the solution. What has occurred in each of these cases is a prime example of why health insurance should not be tied to employment. Employers are less and less willing to hire people for full-time employment because then they will have to offer health insurance. That leads to the syndrome of ?Well, if I hire you to work 37.5 hours, you get insurance, so you?re going to only be scheduled for 30 hours.? How is that good for the economy?



Similarly, people find that more and more their insurance provider covers less and less of their healthcare needs. Deductibles are on the rise, co-pays are on the rise, and insurance providers work harder to find reasons to deny coverage. When a woman suffering from breast cancer finds that her insurance won?t cover the treatments because she forgot to mention she was treated for acne as an adolescent, something is horribly, horribly wrong.



But let?s go further. The argument ?it will cost jobs? comes up whenever people talk about increasing the minimum wage, increasing workplace safely, you name it. However, that just ain?t so. When wages are increased, when safety issues are dealt with, there often can be a temporary loss of jobs (more often a loss due to attrition, rather than firings), but after that short period, more people are hired because, when people earn more, they can afford to spend more, which allows people to sell more and make more products.



However, let?s talk abut the jobs lost because the health insurance industry in the U.S. is so archaic and byzantine. People are often fearful of changing jobs because they cannot afford the insurance, or have a pre-existing condition. That means they might find themselves stuck in a dead-end job. Entrepreneurs and would-be small business owners are less likely to quit their jobs (with its employer-provided health care) because they either might not, or cannot, afford the risk of going without insurance for themselves and their families. Shoot, I myself had to check, before we adopted our youngest, to see if my insurance would cover my youngest son because he was born with a condition and would need medical help for it.



Furthermore, look at the savings a single-payer system would offer employers. American automobile manufacturers are struggling these days, and I remember how in the fall, it was expected that the UAW and other unions would have to make more and more concessions to keep GM, Chrysler and Ford afloat. People on Wall Street and financial newspapers railed about the ?overly generous? pensions given to autoworkers. However they ignored the cost of insurance to the Big Three. GM came out with a recent study that demonstrated that it cost $1700 per car cheaper to produce an automobile in Canada than in the U.S. <strong class='bbc'>solely because of healthcare insurance costs</strong>. How many jobs are lost in the U.S. because of these costs?



Now I know that in the U.S. we get all these horror stories about ?healthcare rationing? in Canada, and thousands of Canadians fleeing to the U.S. for healthcare, but, and here?s the kicker, when I read <em class='bbc'>Macleans</em> or the <em class='bbc'>Toronto Globe and Mail</em>, I don?t see loads and loads of Canadians clamoring to bring an American system of health insurance to Canada.

Would you really want the same people running Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security to be responsible for almost 20% of the US economy? Those programs are always on the brink of disaster.

These programs are not on the brink of disaster because they are run by the government. The financial issues which may arise in Medicare and Social Security arise because the President and the Congress, ever since Ronald Reagan, used the trust funds that had developed to keep the budget deficit lower. Stop this usage, and you?ll fin that Social Security will be fine for years to come and tweak Medicare rules and all will work. Medicaid is largely handled through the states. Similarly, it?s a bon mot to claim that the government can?t do anything right. That just ain?t so. My national parks run smoothly, my roads are pretty well done, the water that comes to my home is clean and disease free, and I trust the way my military keeps me from harm.



And, if you want to go further, the banking industry wasn?t run by the government and it was on the verge of collapse until the government helped it. Enron and WorldCom fell apart, and how many companies have gone belly up. Do we really want private industry, with its failings, to run our health care industry?