To anyone who has regularly kept up with this blog of mine, you will know that the issue of healthcare is one that I feel particularly strong and passionate about. In fact, next to promoting a more healthy Earth for us to live on (and I extend this to the way that we produce and consume our food), there is no other issue as important as this (by my estimation).
That said, it breaks my heart, as an American, to see this debate continually raging here in the United States. It is particularly frustrating because, being French (I have dual citizen), and having long and seriously flirted with a move to Canada, largely because of their far superior healthcare system, the knowledge that other countries are doing a far better job in this regard than the United States is has been a particular source of frustration.
Right now, the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world that fails to provide an adequate and affordable, universal health care system for it's people. It is a fact that has been repeated often, and yet, many Americans just do not seem to get this. Many dissenters to even the most modest alterations in the health care system towards a more equitable approach systematically equate it with catch phrases guaranteed to polarize, such as "socialized medicine", "fascism" (they slapped a Hitler mustache on an image of Obama during protests in Washington opposing Obamacare), "government oversight" and my personal favorite, that such a system would be "the first step towards communism".
Here is just a partial list of "communist" nations that have such a system: the United Kingdom (Great Britain), Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Spain, Portugal, Andorra, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Italy, San Marino, Switzerland, Austria, Cyprus, Greece, Israel, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan.
Have you ever seen such a list of rabidly, fanatically communist countries in your life before? No wonder so many Americans are paranoid of health care reform! Who wants to turn into a Stalinist state, like Great Britain? Who wants to see America get a health care system like the one that they get in, say, Australia? What's next if we were to try this out? More vacation time? A more adequate and successful education system? Perish the thought!!
Upon closer examination, of course, you will see that only one of those countries ever actually had a communist government, and only partially at that. That would be East Germany, which has since been absorbed into the Federal Republic of Germany (better known as West Germany until reunification in 1990). Otherwise, the list of countries just mentioned consists of what are generally known to be wealthy, first world, "western" nations, with economic systems not radically different than the American one. And many of the "socialist" systems that those countries enjoy were advocated by none other than President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States!
Polls have consistently shown that a majority of Americans favor a universal, affordable health care system. What prevents them from getting it is the knee jerk reaction mindset that any move to such a system is a concession to socialism, fascism, and even communism!
In the meantime, the present system continues, even though almost all Americans seem to agree that it not only does not work, but is, in fact, an abysmal failure. It is advocated by the large health insurance corporations that reap their blood money from it, as well as the large drug companies that do the same. They do not just make profits, they rake them in! With so much money that they get from cheating the rest of us, is it any wonder that they go to such extraordinary lengths and sponsor massive campaigns to preserve the system that they profit so greatly from? Personally, I never understood why people who get so automatically worked up about government exploitation of a proposed health care system do not get offended that the very same drugs that are made right here in the United States are sold for not only cheaper, but for far, far cheaper in a place like Canada, which has price controls, than they are sold right here in the United States, where they are made! Many Americans try to get their drugs through Canada, because smuggling these same drugs made right here in the USA from a foreign country is still far cheaper and better than buying them for the suggested price here on the shelves of American pharmacies and other stores! Logic should tell you that there is something really wrong with that. Yet, this fact seems to escape far too many Americans, and hardly anyone seems to notice, let alone get outraged, something that absolutely infuriates me!
Of course, there are Americans who are paying attention, and working to try and change this by enlightening their fellow Americans. Ralph Nader is one of them, and earlier this year, he wrote a piece on this very subject, directly comparing Obamacare with the Canadian, single-payer system. Surely, I do not need to tell you that his comparison was unfavorable for Obamacare, which makes modest changes to the failed health care system that exists presently in the United States.
Canadians on average spend not only less on their healthcare system than Americans do, but actually half of what Americans on average pay! This is a statistic that continues to boggle my mind, and yet many Americans either just do not know this, understand it, or perhaps accept it. Yet, these facts do not lie.
In Canada, people are born with health care coverage, and they enjoy the benefits of it until the day that they die. Health coverage is not based on one's income or job, which means that everyone gets the same health care. Nobody is excluded from it, regardless of income or job status. The Canadian healthcare system does not make a point of funneling profits to the elite 1%, which the American system does. Canadians are not burdened with co-pays or deductibles, while the costs of these in the United States remains unaffordable to millions of Americans, who are then forced to go without adequate coverage for their medical needs.
Many American critics of such a system argue that there is a lack of "freedom" with it, because there is no freedom of choice. In fact, as Ralph Nader points out, Canadians have far more freedom to pick the doctors of their choice, and at no additional cost. Under the convoluted Obamacare system, Americans do not enjoy that same level of freedom of choice, and it certainly costs much more to go out of network. Obamacare is over 2,500 pages, plus regulations. By comparison, Nader points out that the Canadian medicare bill was thirteen pages.
The Canadian system has many advantages, but the primary advantage is that it puts people, rather than profits, first, and as Nader points out, it "is funded by income, sales and corporate taxes that, combined, are much lower than what Americans pay in premiums." Canada, Nader points out, pays 10% of its GDP for the health care system that covers everyone, while Americans pay 18% of their GDP for a system that continues to exclude millions!
A large part of the reason that Canada's system is more affordable than the American one is that there are price regulation in place, because the government negotiates the price to make it more affordable. By contrast, Nader points out:
"In the United States, under Obamacare, Congress made it specifically illegal for the government to negotiate drug prices for volume purchases, so they remain unaffordable."
Finally, the healthcare system in Canada is a source of pride and unity. Here in the United States, the healthcare debate has continued to polarize and divide Americans for many decades, and there seems to be no relief in sight.
More Americans need to recognize these realities. They are being duped by the elites who profit from an unfair system that would not be tolerated anywhere else in the industrialized world. The fact that every other country in the industrialized world has such a system of universal, affordable healthcare in place, and that none have opted to go backwards and try the American model, should be telling. Also, the fact that the debate about healthcare in the United States continues to rage, election cycle after election cycle, for many decades now, should be telling. I have mentioned before my belief that a large part of the problem is that Americans are often too stuck up and arrogant to assume that they can learn anything from other countries, and that this mentality has led to many problems, and will continue to lead to many more problems, likely of greater and greater severity, in the future. The healthcare debate is one of the major issues where Americans are cheating themselves, and an example of how to do it better is, and has long been, right in front of them, if they could just actually look beyond their own borders.
Yet, the issue never seems to go away. And it won't, until the present system, which a vast majority of Americans agree is a failure that does not provide adequate and affordable health coverage, is scrapped, and a new and far more fair system is put in it's place. I believe that the system that should replace it will be similar to one of the systems that work in all of those other countries. It might not be the Canadian one. But other countries are doing it better.
Read what Nader has to say about the Canadian health-care system in comparison to our own. I do not know if and when things will change in the United States on this issue, but it certainly will not change if more people remain unaware of the advantages of a different system that we are choosing to go without. The more exposure this gets, the more likely things are to change, so spread the word!
Here are the links that got me on this topic of health care this time, once again:
"Ralph Nader lists 22 ways that Canadian health care is superior to Obamacare" by Staff of Buffalo Business First, January 13, 2014:
http://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/blog/morning_roundup/2014/01/ralph-nader-lists-22-ways-that.html
This link provides the specific 22 examples that Nader uses to illustrate that the Canadian system works better than Obamacare "Canadian health care better than Obamacare" commentary piece in The Star:
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2014/01/12/canadian_health_care_better_than_obamacare.html
Some links to the book signing event on April 22nd:
http://www.nationinstitute.org/events/nationbooks/3960/ralph_nader_at_barnes_%26_noble%2C_new_york_city/
http://www.clubfreetime.com/new-york-city-nyc/free-book-signing/2014-04-22/event/180058
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