CommentsMY TURN-I support Elizabeth Warren and most of the ideas of the other Democratic Party candidates, but I'm saddened that in the most recent televised debate, Warren and the others continued to allow the conversation on Single Payer Healthcare to be framed by false information.
All Single Payer Healthcare systems that exist in every other developed country in the world are cheaper than the insurance companies-run systems in the United States, where one-third of every dollar spent on healthcare goes toward the insurance companies’ "administrative costs" and not healthcare. Canada, our neighbor to the north, runs its single-payer system at a government run administrative cost of 3%.
The costs of medical care and drugs under a government run single-payer healthcare in other countries are determined and regulated by the government -- not by the exclusively for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical companies. These entities extort money from desperately sick people who are coerced into paying, since they have no alternative.
Single payer government-run healthcare for all works better, precisely because everyone -- young and old, sick and healthy -- are in the same healthcare system pool, which brings down the average costs per capita, because the young are less likely to incur expensive medical procedures.
While people might like their present doctor, I have yet to meet anybody who likes their present medical care insurance company. Under Medicare For All, all physicians and medical caregivers would be obligated to take payment from this government-run single-payer system.
Medical care in countries like France, with its government-run single payer system, costs about half of what Americans pay for an inferior system of healthcare. France has twice the number of doctors per capita, because they don't limit the number of doctors admitted to medical schools to create an artificial scarcity of doctors.
And under the French system (that I personally lived under for seven years) and others like it, when a reasonable number of patients are seen in a timely manner, without having to wait for months like here in the States, they don't get as sick. Americans often have to wait a month just for an appointment with their primary care physician -- only to be told they need to wait more months to see a specialist who then might say, "Gee, I wish I had seen you earlier. . .but now your condition is terminal."
While the rich pay more taxes in Single Payer Healthcare countries, the French for example live longer on average than do than Americans. The French don't get as sick, and have physicians who actually know who they are, instead of having a U.S. doctor who sees 30-60 patients a day, without the time to review your detailed computerized chart or know who you are.
The French system costs half as much per capita as the American system. But it is hard to get this message across in our purposefully dumbed down society, where I once heard some guy say, "I don't want the government messing with my Medicare."
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles, observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He was a second- generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
