Monday, September 28, 2009
While this health care reform bill is not a switch to the single payer health care system that Canada has or the socialized health care of Great Britain, it does create a bigger role for government in the health care industry, leading many pundits such as George Will to claim that it is simply a slow transition to a single payer system much like Canada's system. It has been widely stated that the United States spends more money per person on health care than any other industrialized nation. I believe this video from a segment on 20/20 shows many of the reasons why. The video shows the increased waits for treatment as well as the importance of the private industry.
One of the major elements of the video is showing how long waits can take. Much like with the private insurance companies in the United States, the Canadian and British governments have deemed certain procedures as elective and will not cover certain medications. This has been a major factor in each governments ability to keep costs down. The governments ration the amount of health care they provide in order to keep costs low. This means the government is only willing to pay for a certain number of doctors and a certain amount of equipment.
Medical innovation in the United States is also highlighted in this segment. Private industry has greatly funded research for new medicines, procedures, and technologies in health care industry in the United States. As the video states, only 4% of medicines used today are from government research. Medical research, like the free market, has many success and failures. So while many possible medicines have not succeed, many others have become important breakthroughs in medical technology. Government, which operates on efficiency and providing the least expensive ways to reach a certain goal, cannot afford the trial and error that private industry can in developing new medicines and technologies.
So while universal health care does have many benefits, it is important to realize that these benefits come at certain costs. Keeping costs down in government health care systems requires rationing money spent on doctors, equipment, and, most significantly, research.
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I think this post is very intriguing because it brings questions where the government draws the line in what coverage they are able to provide for people. Do citizens who are terminally ill, experience a heart attack, have genetic disorders, cannot function without the help of an assistant, fall within the government's program? The government cannot possibly think that they can accommodate every American citizen and any potential health risk. A line has to be drawn or else the system will bankrupt itself and the Obama Administration will fail miserably. Where to draw the line? I'm not sure. Everyone values life, and morals play a great role in this bill, but is it worth $100,000 to keep a terminally ill patient alive for 1 week? 35% of deaths in the U.S. are the result of a cardiovascular condition, but what percentage of that 35% are people who are uninsured? There are currently 47 million U.S. citizens uninsured, and many more who do not have full or even half coverage for the potential medical conditions out there. Where do those uninsured and "insured" but not really insured people fall into play as well? A line will have to be drawn and people will be hurt, but it isn't fiscally responsible nor economically possible to support every U.S. citizen for any possible condition. I don't have the best response for this tricky question, but I don't want the government to bankrupt the country.
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