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The Leonard Lopate Show
Tom Daschle on Universal Health Care
Friday, March 07, 2008
Former US Senator Tom Daschle says that the US must guarantee universal health coverage in order to stay economically competitive. His new book is Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.
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I agree with the former senator that every American should have health insurance.
However the uncertainty with how long the US will be in Iraq and it's final cost, the US just doesn't have the resources to provide adequate care.
How will the US pay for the health care?
We're drowning in debt and now we are in the middle of a recession.
Where is the money going to come from?
Ask him if he knows the results of the OECD's test ranking students in participating worldwide (wall St Journal a few days ago) - we pay a fortune for school and we don't even get a C! Finland and Canada are way up there. This is another way we stand to lose competitively in the world arena.
I think the entire congress should read the Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan - the clearest, friendliest, best written piece on the impact of industrialization on our American body, mind and soul - a great look at the mentality that defines health care (and everything else we do) as well.
The guest has compared our healthcare system's OVERALL (i.e.- 'population') outcomes with those of other countries; in the same breath he named several "islands of excellence". Does he mean that these 'islands' have admirable OVERALL (i.e.- 'population') outcomes? Or, is this sloppy thinking &/or articulation???
The centers in the "sea of mediocrity" have to deal with much more difficult populations and conditions.
Marcia Angell, the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, said that incremental changes are doomed to fail, and the only thing that would work is single payer.
Incremental changes increase the administrative complexity, and the costs, said Angell. We're paying 15-30% or more of our health care bill for the administrative costs and profits of the private system. Doctors have to hire more employees figure out how to pay 20 different insurance companies.
Why does Mr. Daschle want us to pay an additional 30% or 50% of the cost of health care, to pay for administrative costs and insurance industry profits, when the Canadian system has no insurance companies, costs two-thirds of what we pay, and has quality that is as good as ours or better?
I'm a Dutch expatriate in the US. In Holland and most of Western Europe health care is viewed as a public service while in the US it is essentially business. Most Americans would not readily accept an eglitarian health care system, nor would its "health care providers." Now you have the worst of all situations namely a vast bureacracy bloated with government and insurance company inefficiency coupled with a for profit corporate motivation. That said, there is a huge brain drain of European physicians and scientists to the US...and the US remains the font of scientific innovation.
leonard! please!!!!!!!!!!!
This guy is a big loser!!
who cares what he thinks. He is trying to make a come back.
A big part of bring health care costs down needs to be reducing the unhealthy factors in the environment that make us sick. We all pay for those who need asthma treatment, for those who have cancer from hormone treated beef cattle, and for everyone who has expensive complications of diabetes from us government subsidized high fructose corn syrup.
How does Mr Daschel's plan deal with insurance companies who find ways not to pay?
New England Journal of Medicine, 14 Feb 2008, 358(7):661, Perspective: Does preventive care save money? Health economics and the presidential candidates, Joshua T. Cohen, Peter J. Neumann, and Milton C. Weinstein. Presidential candidates claimed that prevention would save money. "Broad generalizations made by many presidential candidates can be misleading.... Although some preventive measures do save money, the vast majority reviewed in the health economics literature do not." Screening 70-year-old men for prostate cancer increases cost and worsens health.
To enable the consumer to shop for health care there does need to be a federal standard -- as there is with Basic Medicare and the programs that wrap around the basic Medicare (A and B) programs. I worked 18 years in a health insurance company and I can attest that no consumer could ever fully undertand their plan based on what is written (or not mentioned) in their health plan description - even if they had insurance background and the tenacity to try to understand it. Without a national standard, the consumer has no realistic way to compare policies until it is too late -- when they get sick and discover something is not covered, or has dollar or treatment caps/limitations that were not clear to them -- sometimes intentionally-- due to the lack of clarity in the benefit description. This is especially true of "self-insured" plans that do not have to adhere to state standards.
I appalled at how little coverage WNYC devotes to alternative medicine, as if conventinal medicine is the only game worth discussing in connection with health care. This is despite the fact that CAM (Complimentary and alternative medicine) is growing explosively in this country, and despite volumes of research underscoring the limitations of conventional medicine in addressing the epidemics of our time, such as diabetes, cancer and auto-immune disorders, and despite the extensively documented harm caused to millions from poorly understood medicines which utimately had to be withdrawn. As much as I love this station and this show, WNYC bows down to the authority of the conventional bio-medicical and pharmaceutical industry. In this sense, it has abdicated it's journalistic responsibilities. I can't help but wonder if this has anything to do with the funding that WNYC receives from the medical and pharmaceutical industry.
I want to bury my head in Lake Louise when I realize that only a handful of people in the US know much at all about our non-system of health care. Absurdities abound. Medicare doesn't cover the major and growing need of elderly Amer.--nursing home care. Nor does anyone stand in line to fine a rational way to finance care for mentally retarded/dev. delayed. One yr. of covering those groups who, granted, need personal as well as medical care could fund all of the new procedures (well, those mettlesome costly ones) that insurance cos. run from. Over 2/3 of Medicaid $ (which all assume goes for those undeserving poor folks) cover NH and ICF-MR residents. Then the awkwardness that most of those poor are children whom we as a nation seemed to set as our least worry. Can't vote, we're not sure they should get some boost if they come out of the shute behind...our support of hlth care industries is what counts and we sure leave none of them behind. The uninsured answer is a no-brainer; the really thorny issues of long term care will surely be left to a future group of leaders who don't get headaches and feel a nap coming on when visited by a big-gun hlth. care industry expert... visiting with lots of info on their need for continued receipt of the biggest health/welfare subsidies in the world. And the notion that insur. cos. will climb aboard so they don't have to cover high cost items. There's still pocket change for cosmetic surg!
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