National Healthcare Policy

National Healthcare Policy

(Written for a research economics class)

Source: (http://www.cato.org/pubs/catosletter/catosletterv3n1.pdf)

Did you know that about 1/3 of U.S. citizens that aren’t insured are eligible to receive free medical care by either joining Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program? In some hospitals and clinics across the country (Texas was used in my source), people without insurance can get help from the same doctors and sit in the same beds as everyone else that is admitted, insured or not. Hospital Administrators are the only people in the system who are benefited (according to this article) because doctors and nurses get paid for treating people while Administrators are paid by the patients (not included in the article is the payroll of Hospital Administrators whom I think probably get a pretty big paycheck and are driven by greed, sorry just speculation). Hospitals like these actually have paid employees going through the emergency room and trying to get people to sign up for Medicaid. In other countries like Canada and some European countries, they are proud that their emergency room patients are insured while, in the US, we’re “ashamed” that ours aren’t always. The fact is, however, that US healthcare is overwhelmingly better and more efficient then those countries!

In Britain, they seem to think that their healthcare system in the “envy of the world”. Canadian gov’t health officials say much of the same thing. These two countries doctors see about 50% more patients then American doctors do but, therefore, they have less time with each patient. A study of the average doctor visit, however, discovered that the typical general practitioner barely has time to take a patients temperature and write a prescription. If the doctors actually diagnose a problem, they don’t even have the necessary equipment, in many occasions, to treat the problem. Some facts on the matter: Among people with chronic renal failure, only half as many Canadians as Americans get dialysis, only a third as many Britains also. The rate of coronary bypass surgeries in patients that are in need of them is three to four times what it is in Canada (here in the US) and about four times what it is in Britain. The country that happened to invent the CAT scan was Britain, exporting more than half the CAT scanners used in the world but they made very few for their own use. They have about half the amount that is needed in their hospitals!

Quality and cost (more bang for your buck) is a major issue about universal healthcare. Universal healthcare is currently looking pretty promising to the US by many, because the life expectancy in the US isn’t much different than in developed countries and the US has a higher infant mortality rate than most other developed countries. A way to tell the efficiency and quality of healthcare systems, then, is to look at conditions for which we know medical services can make a real difference. Examples: Among women who are diagnosed w/ breast cancer, only 20% die in the US, 33% die in France and Germany, while almost half in the UK and New Zealand. Men diagnosed with prostate cancer, less than 20% die in the US compared to 25% in Canada, almost 50% in France, and more than 55% in the UK!

Another issue is equal access to healthcare regarding universal healthcare. In Canada and Britain, the healthcare officials have said that the primary goal of its National Healthcare Service is equal access to healthcare. The British gov’t, however, studied the access to see the progress that has been made after the National Healthcare Service was applied. In 1980, they had a major report that stated something to the effect of not having very much progress in achieving equality of access to health care in their country. “In fact, it looks like things are worse today, in 1980, than they were 30 years ago when the British National Health Service was started”. Everyone in the British gov’t was angry and embarrassed of the results and promised to do better. A lot of articles were written, a lot of discussions and conferences took place, yet 10 years passed. In the 10 years since the study, they did another one which proved that the access had even further deteriorated and they have since not done a report, ignoring the elephant in the room.

In the US, racial and ethnic minorities are underserved in healthcare. We aren’t alone though. In Canada, there are the Cree and Inuits, New Zealand, the Maoris, Australia, the Aborigine. These groups all suffer from things relating to healthcare needs. When a Universal Healthcare plan is in place, those minorities get even less of the rationed healthcare! “A Canadian study showed vast inequalities among the health regions of British Columbia. In some cases, there were spending differences of 10 to 1 in services provided in one are compared to another.” It’s a fact that when people have to make decisions about who is going to get care and who isn’t, people frequently choose the younger patient. Surveys of the elderly show that senior citizens in the US say it’s much easier to get surgery, see doctors, see specialists, and enter hospitals then seniors in other countries say.

Efficiency was brought up a little earlier; it has been said that national health insurance is an efficient way to deliver health care. “Probably the most telling statistic for hospitals is average length of stay. In general, efficient hospitals get people in and out more quickly. By that standard, the U.S. hospital sector is the most efficient in the world. And I think by many other standards it would not be much in dispute that the U.S. hospital sector is far more efficient than the hospital sectors of other countries.” “In Britain, where at any one time there are a million people waiting to get into British hospitals, 15% of the beds are empty, another 15% are filled with chronic patients who really don’t need the services of hospital; they’re simply using the hospital (through the universal healthcare plan) as an expensive nursing home. So, effectively, almost one-third of the beds are closed off to acute care patients.”

A study between the US and Britain hospitals showed that, when the same amount of money was spent on the same amount of patients, the US patients were receiving far more care, more access to specialists, and other services. The person who compiled the article stated: “Most of what I’m telling you here today I learned, not from right-wing critics of national health insurance, but from people who believe in it.”

“No matter how many problems they document, no matter how many failures they write about, they don’t give up their faith in the system. They all believe that all the failures that they write about can be reformed away. They all believe that we just haven’t tried hard enough to reform the system and make it work. Sadly, they are wrong. Virtually all of these problems are inevitable consequences of the politicization of medicine. Why do these systems overprovide to the healthy and underprovide to the sick? Well, in the US, about 4% of the patients spend half the money. If you’re a politician allocating health care dollars, you cannot afford to spend half your money on 4 percent of voters-4 percent who may be too sick to go to the polls and vote for you anyway. Why is the hospital sector so inefficient? Because it’s in the self-interest of hospital managers to be inefficient. The chronic care patients and the empty beds are the cheap beds. It’s the acute care patients that cost money. Why can the rich and powerful jump to the head of the waiting lines? Because those are the people who control the system. They can change the system. If members of parliament, the wealthy, and the powerful had to wait for care along with everyone else, these systems would not last for a minute.”

Before I make a concrete opinion on universal healthcare, I want to see more facts and statistics and I want to investigate countries which have such a healthcare system  were mentioned in the article. The article I read is by the founder and president of the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, John Goodman.