InformingVoters.org: Informing voters about their
choices.
Lead with the Heart, Steer with the Head
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.”
- Thomas Jefferson
|
InformingVoters.org: Informing voters about their
choices. |
 |
 |
 | |
|
Welcome to Informing Voters! The purpose of this web site is to inform the American public about public policy issues that affect us. This site is nonpartisan and attempts to provide a realistic and balanced view and analysis of the current issues in the news. The author of this site has a masters degree in economics from George Washington University and has spent the past fifteen years in the Washington, DC area looking at the fish from inside the fishbowl. He is a political independent who has worked for both the Republican and the Democratic parties in the past (though for neither of them currently). For more about the author, please click HERE. This site will be updated as current events require and time permits. There is an alarming amount of misinformation in the healthcare reform debate going on right now. Here are a few myths and facts about healthcare in the Unites States: Myth #1: Healthcare in the U.S. is the best in the world. Fact: By any broad measure of success, the United States has mediocre healthcare for a modern country. 30 countries have a longer life expectancy than the U.S. and 38 countries have lower infant mortality rates than the United States. The insurance companies and their minions try to pick at the numbers and try to explain the U.S.’s low scores claim that we count things differently in the U.S. than the rest of the world. But this is not borne out by the facts: the way healthcare expenditures, life expectancy and infant mortality are counted is standardized for all countries reporting to the World Health Organization, the not for profit entity that tracks such data. More on that later. Myth #2: Countries with government-guaranteed access to healthcare pay more as a society for their healthcare than the U.S. does. Fact: What matters are total expenditures on healthcare, the combination of government expenditures and private expenditures. By that measure, with the exception of Monaco (basically a tax haven for the super-wealthy with a population of 30,000) and Luxemburg (a very wealthy country with a population of 500,000 (the size of Chattanooga, Tennessee)), the United States spend at least 50% more PER PERSON on healthcare than any other country on Earth. We actually pay twice as much per person as some other modern countries do. For instance, we pay almost three times as much per person on healthcare as Japan does. But the Japanese live longer than we do (they have the longest life expectancy of any nation) and they have the second best infant mortality rate in the world. Myth #3: The healthcare bill that Congress is about to vote on amounts to a “government takeover” of healthcare. Fact: The current proposal before Congress does not involve any kind of “government takeover” of healthcare. It merely mandates that everyone buy healthcare insurance so there are no freeloaders in the healthcare system. The basic service healthcare insurance provides is called “pooled risk”. The economics of pooled risk make a clear case for a “pooled response”, such as insurance. Basically, it makes more sense for people who face the same or similar risks, such as disease, accidents, war, etc. to pool their resources to face that risk. Why is this? Because, if each of us were to set aside enough financial resources to cover the potential “disaster scenario” of healthcare costs, we would each have to set aside millions of dollars. But the reality of the situation is that most of us will not face such a disaster scenario for many years (and perhaps not ever). By pooling resources, we can set aside enough money to cover the number of disaster scenarios that are likely to occur for the other people that are pooling their resources with us. This reduces the amount that each of us has to set aside, reducing the amount of sacrifice that each of us must make to cover our risk. It’s the same basic argument that is used to justify military spending by the Federal government. The proposal before Congress this weekend basically mandates that everyone buy insurance. This avoids people not paying into the resources pool and then showing up in the emergency room for very expensive treatments that would not have been necessary if the condition had been treated earlier. Oftentimes when uninsured people do this, they end up not being able/willing to pay their bill and this cost then goes into the hospital’s overhead costs. This overhead is then marked up and passed on to the rest of us in the form of higher fees for services. This increases the fees the rest of us pay and the fees the insurance companies pay. The insurance companies then mark it up AGAIN in the form of higher premiums. It’s a vicious cycle. It’s actually even worse than it sounds. This is one of the primary forces that is driving the spiraling cost of healthcare in the America much faster than the rest of the developed world. Myth #4: Guaranteeing access to healthcare for everyone requires a government takeover of healthcare in the U.S. Fact: A single payer system like Canada or England is only one way to get there, and (in my opinion) not the best one. Japan and Germany, both of which spend much less per person on healthcare than Americans, and which have much better infant mortality rates and longer life expectancies, take a different route to get there. And their route seems to work much better than either the single payer system or what we have here in the U.S. They mandate that everyone get healthcare insurance, much like the current proposal before Congress. But they have a network of for-profit and not-for-profit insurers competing for their citizens’ business. The not-for-profit insurers in these systems are similar to what the U.S. provides for military veterans and their families through USAA auto insurance. It requires a bit of seed money to set up, but once it gets going, it is a self-funding cooperative insurance company owned by its members, the people who it covers and does not cost taxpayers anything. USAA has some of the lowest rates on automobile insurance and they consistently rank much better than any other automobile insurer for customer satisfaction. And if USAA earn excess profit during the year, its members get a dividend check in the mail. Myth #5: The current proposal before Congress increases the Federal Budget deficit. Fact: According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the current proposal actually reduces the Federal deficit by $138 billion over the next 10 years and reduce the Federal deficit by another $1.2 TRILLION the following decade. So, what does every other developed country on Earth have in common, besides paying MUCH less than the U.S. for healthcare and getting better results? They ALL have universal healthcare coverage. Every one of them. The U.S. is alone among developed nations in not offering universally accessible healthcare. And we pay 50% more per person on healthcare than anyone else and get worse-than-average results compared to other modern countries. Gee, do you think there MIGHT be some kind of connection there? The U.S. pays more than 50% above any other country on Earth per person for medical care. And what do we get for the 50% extra we pay, primarily to the insurance industry fat cats? Lower-than-average life expectancy compared to Western Europe and the developed countries in Asia and the Pacific (Japan, Korea, Australia, etc.) and MUCH higher-than-average infant mortality rates than other developed countries. Here’s a list of countries with better infant mortality rates than the U.S.:
(Source World Health Organization) Here’s a list of countries that have life expectancies that are higher than the U.S.:
(Source World Health Organization) The United States pays at least 50% more per person for healthcare than ANY of these countries. Yet we get worse results. Republicans had both houses of Congress and the White House for 6 years and did nothing to help ordinary working Americans with spiraling healthcare costs. And they did not let Democrats propose any healthcare reform when they had Congress. Then, when the Democrats got Congress and the White House, Republicans suddenly took an interest in healthcare reform. Then they claimed that the Democrats were not letting them have any input into the healthcare. So the Democrats let the Republicans come up with their own healthcare reform proposal. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the Republican proposal would cost $60 billion and result in MORE people without healthcare insurance than is currently the case. Then the Democrats incorporated 160 Republican amendments into their healthcare reform proposal. And now Republicans are claiming that Democrats are snubbing their newfound interest in healthcare reform. I’m sorry, but this is playing politics at its worst. Even though I think this proposal is not the absolutely best solution to the issue of healthcare reform, I think it is the best we are likely to get in the near future. And, if Republicans retake control of Congress, we can be sure that nothing significant will happen to help Americans deal with spiraling healthcare costs and insurers’ abuses, just like nothing happened during the six years they had absolute control over both houses of Congress and the Presidency. |
||