Here’s an article from the Washington Post by T.R. Reid called “5 Myths About Health Care Around the World”. It should be required reading for every right winger who is afraid of single-payer or a public option, or of placing severe regulations on health insurers.

Reid tackles five common myths:

1. It’s all socialized medicine out there. It would not bother me in the least if it was, as socialized medicine does a better job than for-profit, but let’s be rigid in our definition: Great Britain has a socialized system, as do our own veterans. Every other industrialized democracy has some form of single payer or public/private hybrid.

2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices and long lines. Generally speaking, not true. Other countries generally allow choice of doctor and hospital, and wait times for emergency and serious conditions are virtually nonexistent. But waiting lists are a problem in Canada, generally in Ontario and Quebec provinces, for some reason. But other countries often outperform our own in the area of wait times.

Which reminds me – my Dad was undergoing treatment for a wide range of maladies in his final days. One doctor asked if he was a veteran, which he was, and suggested we go to VA for our medicines. I thought “Oh God – here we go – long wait, crappy care.” In fact, we got in in less than a week, had a very good doctor, and got our prescriptions filled free of cost. It was a pleasant surprise to find them to be so professional and efficient.

3. Foreign health systems are bloated, inefficient bureaucracies. Actually, nothing like ours. All other systems are less bureaucratic and inefficient than us.

4. Cost controls stifle innovation. Interesting conundrum – cost controls often drive innovation. Example:

In the United States, an MRI scan of the neck region costs about $1,500. In Japan, the identical scan costs $98. Under the pressure of cost controls, Japanese researchers found ways to perform the same diagnostic technique for one-fifteenth the American price. (And Japanese labs still make a profit.)

In addition, there are many innovations in use here developed elsewhere, artificial knees and hips, for example.

5. Health insurance has to be cruel. Indeed, American health insurers are cruel, and even have “death panels”, which they call by other names. In other countries, health insurance companies must operate on a non-profit basis for basic care, and are not allowed to turn away or rescind applicants. In return for these restrictions, they are given a guaranteed clientele, as coverage is mandatory, and subsidies for those who cannot afford care.

Which, in turn, punctures the most persistent myth of all: that America has “the finest health care” in the world. We don’t. In terms of results, almost all advanced countries have better national health statistics than the United States does. In terms of finance, we force 700,000 Americans into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero. Britain: zero. Japan: zero. Germany: zero.

Given our remarkable medical assets — the best-educated doctors and nurses, the most advanced hospitals, world-class research — the United States could be, and should be, the best in the world. To get there, though, we have to be willing to learn some lessons about health-care administration from the other industrialized democracies.

A little humility would go a long way here, along with some willingness by right wingers to get out and see the rest of the world. That could dispel most of the mythology,and free us up to fix our own system.

PS: Here is a film done for PBS by Reid called Sick Around the World.

I face a dilemma faced by many: My current health insurance costs $700 a month for a policy that has a $2,500 deductible, $5,000 maximum out of pocket costs, and a 70-30 split for expenses in the donut hole between $2,500 and $5,000. “Routine” costs, such as checkups, are not covered. Maximum coverage is $1 million.

So here is how it pans out: I am guaranteed to spend at least $10,900 before I have one nickle of coverage. For the $2,500 after that, I will pay $750, so that for the first $13,400 in costs each year, my insurance will pay $1,750. So my out-of-pocket each year is guaranteed to be $8,400, and can go as high as $12,150 without regard to routine expenses.

Typically my actual costs run less than a thousand dollars. If I have a complaint, I always weigh what I am already paying against and know that I am 100% out-of-pocket. So unless I am seriously ill, and I never have been, I usually opt not to see the doc. Most things take care of themselves. I have a blood test twice a year, and beyond that, not much.

Here’s the problem, and I know it is one that every self-paid insured person wonders about: Given good health, is it worth a guaranteed expense of $8,400 a year, and a total exposure of $11,650 each year when actual costs are probably only going to run a thousand or so? I can do a lot with that $8,400 in premiums I pay, including getting checkups and paying for injuries. Even when I am most at risk, when I drive, I’m pretty much covered, as insurers are liable for 100% of my costs if I am not at fault. I’ve never caused an accident.

Of course, the insurance is to cover all of the people who exceed the thresholds – the cancer and heart patients. I could be one of them, but I am in in pretty good shape, running ten miles a week, lifting weights and hiking. My mental outlook is healthy.

I have been thrown into a pool that attracts people with very high risks, and excluded from the normal risk groups due to a preexisting condition.

My temptation is just to go bare. I think about it. Alot. Knock on wood?

From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

The UDHR was adopted by the United Nations in 1948 without dissent. The United States was a member at that time.

So, how are we doing? Despite constant criticism from the left, many progressive reforms from the past remain in force. We have Social Security, which provides retirement security for the aged, disability and survivor benefits as well. We have Medicare for the aged, Medicaid for the poor, the VA hospital system for veterans. We have unemployment benefits for the recently unemployed. We have Workers Compensation, which provides coverage for injuries and income replacement for loss of wages due to those injuries. (Workers give up their right to sue their employers for injuries as part of the W/C system.)

There is no right to food, though we have the Food Stamps program, which is substantial. We have minimum wage laws, but they are inadequate for a single-earner family, often necessitating a working spouse and child care expenditures. To assist low income people with children, we have the Earned Income Credit, which is substantial. We also have programs to assist with child care for the working poor. We have many homeless people, and private and public shelters for many of them, and soup kitchens. Virtually every public service has a provision for the poor and working poor, including utilities and bus rides, college tuition (a few grants and gazillions in loans available), and housing assistance. Most states offer breaks on property taxes for elderly retirees on fixed income.

We appear to be doing a pretty good job fulfilling the mandate of UDHR. Where we come up short is in the area of health care. With an employer-based system, employees lose mobility. Private insurance companies are bound to turn people away, and to inflict heavy overhead burdens on the system to protect their contractual prerogatives. Millions of people are under-insured, and in 2009 alone as many as a million people will suffer medical bankruptcy, with 60% of those thinking they had adequate insurance coverage. Millions more are uninsured, many by choice, many due to preexisting conditions, and others due to inability to pay premiums.

In summary, we have a wide array of social services available in this country. Most of them are under continuing attack by the right. We only need go one step further … universal health care provided by heavily regulated not-for-profit private concerns, or government.

For those of you who look at the left and say we never have a kind word, I beg to differ. Due to leftists who came before us, we have a wide array of benefits in this country for poor and disabled people. Just one step further now …

Each morning when I awake, my first task, in which I delight, is to read scripture. Even after all these years, I continually stumble on passages I had previous missed or misunderstood.

Example from this mornings’ wanderings in the Gospel of Mark (4: 3-11)

Jesus and the disciples traveled unto the Sommorah one day, and sought repast from its fishermen. While there, a group of the village elders put upon Jesus to give evidence of his divinity by healing a man whose body was covered with cankerous sores.

Jesus continued with his meal, failing to engage the elders, who became insistent, taking from Jesus the fish in his hand and imploring him to act. The disciples too implored the master to act, as evening was upon them, and shelter would not be offered if Jesus could not perform a miracle.

Jesus arose, and walked to the afflicted man. He looked upon him, and said to those around him “Verily, I say to thee, that a man shall not enter the kingdom of heaven lest his soul first be removed of cankers. And I say to this man that he shall see the kingdom, and his afflictions removed.”

He then turned to address the throng that had assembled. “Verily I say unto thee, that the works of my father on earth are here for all to see, but for those who will not see, I cannot provide. I cannot heal a man whose disease already exists, nor will I take upon myself the burden of healing him when he cannot offer up payment to the doctors and elders of the village.”

Now I understand.

Footnote: There is dispute (which has become heated at times) among scholars about the King James version, which uses the word “exists”, as it is derived from the Hebrew מעודכנת, which meant “medically extant”, but which was translated to Greek to mean אינטרנט, or “of being”. Modern American biblical translations have Jesus saying “Dude, it’s already there. Can’t fix it.”

Let’s start with the obvious: American has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It’s become black leprosy eating away at the American experiment – a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn’t be equal to dreaming it up on purpose. The system doesn’t work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic legislation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it’s a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they’re sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable – and that’s the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won’t get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Thus beings an article by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone – it’s a devastating critique of medical insurance companies, which are eating our lunch, and the Democratic Party, which is destroying our hope.

It’s not on line as of this writing, so get the magazine (very interesting article in there too on the breakup of the Beatles). Well worth the cover price.

Why is it that in this sick and twisted country the only ‘news’ reporters that actually report on and challenge power are employed by a fake news show on a basic cable network, and the only writing that reports accurately on the politics of health care is a magazine dedicated to rock and roll?

Are our institutions so corrupt that others are filling the vacuum?