What should good health care cost?

How to save America trillions of dollars

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
6/23/07

With the official release of Michael Moore’s “SiCKO” still a week off, the insurance companies and pharmaceuticals are gearing up to spend billions to try and discredit the movie and preserve the status quo.

The flood of disinformation, which never really stops, is revving up as the people who are making a fortune in the medical field gear up to protect that gravy train. When you are pulling in hundreds of billions a year, a few billion here and there to protect it seems prudent.

So we’re already hearing the vivid (and untrue) stories of Canadians waiting months for critical procedures, or of how thousands of Canadians are sneaking across the border for medical care they can’t get at home (the truth is that thousands of AMERICANS are sneaking across that same border for the same reason). We’ll hear about how the English hate their medical system. (They hate it so much that Margaret Thatcher openly acknowledged there would be a revolution if she tried to change it). And of course we’ll hear about how the French have universal health care, and so it MUST be bad.

The leading Democratic candidates, frightened to death of the hatchet job the big medical industries will do on them, are already triangulating, trying to promise the people a working system while assuring Big Medicine that their profits won’t be harmed. It’s a promise that cannot be kept. Republican answers, of course, are even worse, ranging from removing all government regulations to Schwarzenegger’s goofy scheme in which everyone is forced to buy health insurance.

So let’s ignore what the politicos have to say on the grounds that the Democrats will be worthless and the Republicans will be vicious, and just look at what universal health care would really mean.

First, some numbers. The US spends approximately $2.2 trillion, or 16% of its GDP, on health care. By comparison (http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/chcm010307oth.cfm), France, by far the most generous health care provider, spends 10.5% of its GDP on health care. Canada spends 10.1% and the UK spends 7.6%.

Those numbers don’t really show the depth of the gouging Americans are getting, because they are measured as a function of GDP. But payroll income ranges from 60% of GDP in Canada to 72% in France, whereas in America it’s a hair under 50%. It was around 70% as recently as 1963, but thanks to the unremitting pressure of corporations to feather their nests at the expense of everyone else, Americans have seen their share of the national wealth decrease by 45% over the past 40 or so years. But because taxes are weighted toward them rather than corporations, they still get stuck picking up the tab.

AND they have to pay premium rates for shoddy health care, since corporations believe they have the right to skim 30-50% off the top in the form of profits.

If we assume that universal health care reduced the cost of a health care system to that of France’s (and only two countries in the world spend more, one being Switzerland which spends 11.5% on health care. Of course, they have no military budget to speak of, so that’s part of it), then that $2.2 trillion and 16% is reduced to about 10.5%, or an annual savings of about $700 billion.

Mind you, the French system is incroyable. Things like six months paid maternity leave, and they even send people around with meals and to do your laundry if you are at home and in recovery.

If America went on the cheap and went for a British style system, which is stark but at least works, the annual savings would be about $1.2 trillion a year. But Americans work hard, they have the highest productivity on earth, so let’s assume that they are entitled to the standards of health care that the French enjoy.

Medical costs would be about $1.5 trillion. Taxes would go up, of course. If we assume that the GDP is $13.5 trillion, that means that taxes would go up about 7% across the board (not 10.5%, since some tax money is already in the health care system and would be subsumed into the new system).

So, you would be paying about seven percent more in federal taxes than you do now. However, you would NOT be paying for health insurance (and you can calculate how much of your income that takes up now, but for the average family of four, it’s currently about $1,100 a month), or co-pays (those would be a thing of the past) or insurance to cover when your health insurance doesn’t cover.

Best of all, you would never, ever have to worry about your claim being denied.

You’ll never have an employer tell you he’s letting you go because the insurance company thinks you have too many high-risk factors.

You’ll never hear the words “pre-existing condition” again.

One of the scare tactics the health industry like to use is that of a huge government bureaucracy that universal health care would cause. But most Canadians, when they visit an ER or a doctor, have to fill out one simple form, and that’s it. Many never even see a bureaucrat. Doctors in America spend between 30 and 50 percent of their time dealing with insurance forms and battling dozens of different private bureaucracies, each with its own labyrinthine set of rules and policies. Most also spend hundreds of thousands on malpractice, another hidden cost of the US system that would largely vanish.

No doctor ever has to refuse a patient needed medical care because they can’t afford it and insurance won’t cover. No hospital is forced to dump patients out in the street.

Nobody who is sick has to spend hundreds of hours fighting an insurance company who is trying to screw them. And insurance companies, driven by profits, always try to screw their policy holders. Regulated, they average out slightly better than the Mafia. Unregulated, they make Tony Soprano look like Mother Theresa.

So. Do you want a better system that will save everyone trillions of dollars, or do you feel that we don’t do enough for the Big Medicine Industry, and should continue to let them determine what kind of care we get and at what cost, with an eye to ever-increasing profits?