I just caught another thread concerning the 60 minute segment on universal health care. Americans have been scammed and it looks like 60 minutes is now an accomplice.
I am providing here an article which isn't available on-line but the 21 pages of Dr. Lights biography are. I typed this out because it is imperative for Americans to understand why our health care system is broken and how we can provide better care for less and still cover every man, woman and child in America. The article dwells primarily on "single payer" "socialized medicine" discussing other models such as the Netherlands and why competition and market forces do not work in health care. The entire article taken from "New Jersey Medicine" can be found here;
Improving Medical Practice and the Economy through Universal Health Insurance by Dr. Donald W. Light PhD
Here are three paragraphs from the article. Please read and print out this article to pass around. America is literally dying for better health care and the tragedy is it doesn't have to. Business can no longer afford to supply medical insurance resulting in workers losing benefits or worse losing jobs. There are some good answers here, give it a read!
Two American myths among clinicians are that universal health care means becoming government employees and losing professional clout. Most medical services in universal health care systems are delivered by physicians in private practice or in arrangements that give them more autonomy and control than American physicians enjoy. In fact, the basic mistake that organized medicine made here was to oppose universal health care in the name of autonomy, choice, and freedom and to favor corporate task-masters who compromise all three much more than physicians experience in other affluent countries.<5> All universal systems give the medical profession great powers to decide issues of payments, organization of services, and divisions of labor-they have to.
Medical professions everywhere complain and protest nevertheless; but if one looks closely at the nature and scope of the issues, one finds they are relatively minor compared to the systemic, basic problems that American Physicians face. Many of the terms that American physicians are forced to accept are illegal everywhere else. With furious energy, state and national medical societies have opposed having “the government in your medical cabinet” and preferred having corporations concerned about their profits decide what is covered and how much will be paid. In such a system, for profit corporations dictate reforms, like the extended coverage in Medicare for prescription drugs. An analysis of the costs found that less than 4% of huge new costs (about $535 billion over the first ten years) is accounted for by the cost of new drugs.<6> The other 96% goes largely to additional profits for the pharmaceutical companies and to corporate middlemen who do not exist in any other universal health care system, because they are unnecessary. If this is the price of boondoggling, of relieving medical debts, and enabling physicians to prescribe what they think their patients need-$25 to corporations for every $1 to pay for medicine-there is no chance that physicians and nurses will practice in a stable health care system that honors their work and pays them for needed care.
“Single payer” plans should be called “more choice, less cost” plans, because patients and their doctors have more choice, and single payers systems have the least overhead as well as the best structure for controlling costs of any universal health care arrangement. They are also far more equitable. Funds collected from income taxes, for example, are more equitable and efficient that any alternative. America’s single-payer plan is Medicare, and it is based on social fairness, but it operates in a world of private, competitive plans based on “actuarial fairness,” the concept that it is unfair to make healthier people pay for sicker people.<7> This ethos works against clinicians, of course, because it avoids of denies the obvious: sick people need medical services, and those who provide them should be paid well and honored for doing so. The goal, instead, is to maximize profits by minimizing the proportion of a population’s illnesses and disabilities one has to pay for. Table 2 summarizes most of the techniques used to do this. They all make both the lives of patients who need medical services and those who provide them miserable, especially manipulations of benefit design and techniques of claims harassment. They are distinctive features of American health care.
Here is another site that has some good information on it;
Physicians for a National Health Program.Its your life and the life of your children we are talking about here. Invest the time to make a difference.
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