The US spends more money on healthcare than any other nation, yet has some of the unhealthiest people.
This is due to the private for-profit healthcare system controlled by private health insurers.
Not only that, but thousands of Americans die needlessly every year due to either not being able to afford health insurance, or because the health insurer denied needed care that would’ve kept the person alive.
The US health care system is not only dysfunctional; it is criminally-negligent.
Hundreds of billions of dollars flow into the private, for-profit health insurance companies from individual, employer, and government coffers, yet the accessibility and quality of care is a big problem.
Whenever anyone demands single-payer, government-funded healthcare, there is immediate howling from for-profit insurers and hospital chains about ‘socialism,’ ‘government death panels,’ and all sorts of lies are then put out by these healthcare cartels and their paid media and special interest lobbyist whores to fool people into thinking that government must stay out of healthcare, and that private for-profit healthcare is the only good option.
Yet the evidence says otherwise. The government-funded Medicaid system delivers better care with much less overhead than the private, for-profit system does. Contrary to popular belief, it is the private for-profit healthcare system that is wasteful and forces people to face ‘death panels’ which deny their care.
When it comes to Obamacare, it is a dismal failure. What it basically does is force people to buy private health insurance that is still unaffordable, and of questionable quality. To add insult to an already bad injury, it punishes people by making them pay a penalty for being unable to afford private health insurance. This is just plain fucking disgusting!
But even though the US healthcare system is bad, many Americans have been convinced by false stories and fake evidence that socialized healthcare is much worse.
Well, if that’s the case, then how come virtually all the countries in the world have socialized form of health care? And why doesn’t any other country want a US-style health care system?
Whatever the flaws of a socialized health care system may be, it is still far better than the for-profit US-style healthcare system (if you can call it that).
Some years ago, when the effort to enact Obamacare was starting, the for-profit healthcare crowd trotted out a Canadian lady with a convincing sob-story about how horrible Canada’s socialized healthcare system is.
The story went like this: The lady was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The doctors in Canada then put her on a long waiting list for surgery, something like 4-5 months.
The lady freaked out and went to the US to get her surgery. Then the for-profit insurance cabal enlisted her for their campaign against government-funded healthcare by running TV ads featuring the Canadian lady tumor victim telling her story about how terrible the Canadian healthcare system, and socialized healthcare in general, are for making her wait so long to get surgery.
But what was conveniently, and deliberately, not said about the Canadian lady’s medical situation was that the tumor that she was diagnosed with was benign, not life threatening, and she could’ve easily waited those months, gotten her surgery in Canada, and lived.
Another argument that the for-profit healthcare cartel puts forward against government-sponsored healthcare is that it puts people on long waiting lists, and that people needlessly suffer, and may die before their wait is over.
But let’s use some common-sense here.
Long wait times in countries with ‘socialized’ healthcare systems aren’t simply due to the system being socialized.
A country with a socialized healthcare system automatically gives everyone, rich and poor, equal access to healthcare. It doesn’t leave anyone out.
This naturally means that more people will now be in line for health services. So yes, everyone will have to wait longer. That is just a natural consequence of equal access to health care.
Also, regardless of whether a health care system is private or socialized, there are only so many doctors around, and they have to balance their workloads. There aren’t hundreds of doctors within a particular hospital or clinic. There are also resource and time limits. No hospital, whether private or public, has hundreds of laboratories, MRI machines, operating rooms and thousands of hospital beds available for each and every person all the time.
Besides, Americans also have to contend with long wait times for medical procedures within the private, for-profit healthcare world in the US.
It would be interesting to see how long Americans would have to wait for healthcare services in the US if everyone in the US had health insurance. I guarantee that even that Canadian tumor lady would take her ass back to Canada super-fast and wait for her surgery there, if this was so. Her wait in Canada would be a short blip compared to how long she’d have to wait in the US!
To drive the point home, let’s just compare the populations of Canada and the US:
Canada= 35.16 million (as of 2013)
US= 318.9 million (as of 2014)
So which country would make one wait longer to receive health care if the citizens of both countries had equal access to health care?
Of course wait times in the US would be longer.
So I rest my case.
Granted, countries with public, government-funded health care systems aren’t perfect. They also face some of the same constraints as private, for-profit systems.
But socialized healthcare systems are still far better than private, for-profit systems, mainly because they include everyone automatically. They don’t cater just to those able to afford health insurance, and ignore those who can’t.
The truth is, that those who know about how the US for-profit health care system works don’t want it at all, regardless of their complaints against their native ‘socialized’ healthcare systems.
The fact is that all these scary stories and other bullshit spread around within the US by the for-profit healthcare cartel against socialized healthcare are simply about protecting the for-profit healthcare cartel’s profits. That’s all that it was, is, and ever will be about for these filthy creatures.
A socialized healthcare system would threaten their profits and personal wealth, so they will fight it tooth and nail. They will make up all sorts of absurdities, lies, and nonsense to prevent it. They will trot out malcontents with sob-stories taken out of context, and cherry-pick information to serve their self-serving, greedy interests.
But what can be done to fix the broken healthcare system within the US that is failing so many, and consigning them to unnecessary pain and even death simply because they cannot afford to pay for health care?
1. Medicaid must be made to cover everyone, rich and poor, 100%; no exceptions. Income must also be eliminated as a determining factor for healthcare eligibility once and for all. Everyone is universally covered. If you pay taxes, you are 100% insured from the cradle to the grave.
2. Eliminate private insurers altogether. Hospitals and clinics can stay in private hands, but prices for services, medicine and other items are negotiated to be realistic, and waste in the form of unnecessary services is eliminated. This will significantly reduce expenses not only for the government and individuals seeking care, but also the overhead expenses of hospitals since they will need much less staff to process payment requests to only one entity- the US government- and only have to follow one set of rules. This is how it works in Canada, and the majority of Canadians are happy with it.
3. If the US regime isn’t willing to socialize medical care altogether, then it must put into place stringent regulations as far as private health care goes, and enact price-controls to ensure people aren’t being fleeced, so that everyone can afford it and is included. The Netherlands has such a system, and it seems to work.
If the US put as much care into healing people as it does toward killing people, then the US would have the absolute best health care system in the world in which no one is left out.
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