The Health Care Solution is Easy, But No One is Listening

Health care is the number one problem in the country. It effects our personal lives and decisions, our business bottom line and competitiveness in the global economy. The best source of collected information and solutions is at the moneyedpolitician. Jack E. Lohman lays it out in a way that makes it easy to understand, even for Republicans, while also providing a blueprint for Democrats to own the issue. Here’s sample of Lohman’s recent cry in the wilderness.

Yes, Canada’s health care system has wait times, and well it should. If Canada took one of every six people out of line, as we effectively do here in the U.S., they’d not have wait times either! But they are, indeed, underserving their people. Shame on them.

Let’s follow Taiwan’s lead. They recently reformed their system after studying every health care system in the world. They came back with an answer, and modeled their new system after … drum roll please … our Medicare.

We must at least get rid of the wasteful insurance bureaucracy, and some corrupt politicians as well. Actually, private healthcare has even more waste and fraud than does Medicare. Excessive charges, high broker commissions, high executive salaries and bonuses and stock options, shareholder profits, and even lobbying and campaign contributions are added to the system and passed on to the patient. And they refuse the sickest of the sick, all things the insurers want to preserve.

So, who’d pay for a Medicare-for-all system?

The same people that are paying for it today, the taxpayers. But we’d pay less than we pay today. We are now paying through cost-shifting, higher taxes, bankruptcy costs, and when employers add their costs to their product price and we reimburse them at the cash register.
Medicare-for-all would cover all citizens, including our politicians and Medicaid/BadgerCare patients, and it would greatly reduce overall administration costs. We’d use the same doctors and hospitals we are using today, so there would not be any wait times or degradation in service. A full 59% of physicians and an even greater number of nurses already support this change, and we’d hope the next administration does its job and passes John Conyers’ HR676 (see www.hr676.org).

Understand that we are already paying the costs of a single-payer system, we just aren’t getting one because part of our payments are also funding profiteering.

The way we can afford it is to pay for it differently than we are today, which means eliminating the costly insurance bureaucracy. That allows us to spend that wasted 31% on health care rather than make-work to pad the pockets of the executives.

In a presentation at the Kaiser Foundation, Harvard professor Dr. David Himmelstein said “If you ask Americans what they want, 64 percent of us say we want national health insurance. If you ask Canadians… would they like a U.S. system, 3 percent would prefer it, which is [also] their illiteracy rate.”

That was easy, right? Think about this: A study of 19 industrialized countries released by the Commonwealth Fund, the U.S. ranked last in preventable mortality – deaths, 18,000, that might not have occurred with timely and effective medical care.