news story / By Alan Sanborn

End Waste, Inequality

(Sept. 17, 2009)  During his town hall meeting in Eureka, Congressman Mike Thompson repeated (and repeated) what seems to be the Obama mantra for the health care debate: “If you like the health care program that you now have, you will be able to keep it.”

There appears to be a minority out there who like paying up to three times as much for medications as the rest of the world, who are content to see their co-pays increase about 10 percent a year, who like donating 30 percent of their medical expenses to industry shareholders and insurance executives, who actually enjoy spending days on the phone trying to reach the low level employees who are paid to deny them coverage. Since masochism isn’t unconstitutional, under the presently proposed reform bills, they’ll be able to continue the practice.

But what if, like pretty much everyone I know, we don’t like our present health care situation? Why is a very vocal minority so adamant in preventing us from trying something new? (Well, not “new” — just trying something that has been working quite well in almost every “developed” nation for the past half-century.)

My wife has full medical coverage through her employer. In a period of several years, she gave birth to our two sons and then went through a fairly rigorous treatment for melanoma. After each of the births, she spent a good part of the month of maternal leave on the telephone with insurance company representatives — holding them to the terms of her insurance policy. We were repeatedly billed for procedures supposedly covered by insurance. The same thing happened during the toughest part of her melanoma treatment. She probably wasted a full month and a half of her life on the telephone because of that cancer — while she was feeling downright sick.

Lisa is a health care worker and a meticulous keeper of records. She only received the coverage she was entitled to all along because she was tireless, and because she knew what she was dealing with. It’s lucky that she truly loves her work, though, because she now has a very unwelcome “pre-existing condition,” and her insurance will most likely not follow her to any next job.

Most of my relatives live in New Brunswick, Canada — perhaps the poorest province. Many of them are older, none of them are wealthy. My 80-year-old aunt suffered a major heart attack a few years ago. It was so bad that she was moved to palliative care. She received such good care there — for a whole month — that she decided to stay alive. She is still with us — slowed down considerably, but as sharp and cantankerous as ever.

When my aunt came home from the hospital, she didn’t need to bother with phone calls to the insurance company. She doesn’t need to shop around on the Internet, or go without dinner, to figure how to pay for her ongoing medication.

My aunt’s health care isn’t free. She pays somewhere around $2,000 a year in taxes. For that, she gets better care than I could hope for if I paid $12,000 a year. It works because everyone is in the pool, with a progressive tax rate. Since everyone is in the pool, the Canadian government has incredible bargaining power with doctors, hospitals and drug companies. There is almost no bureaucratic waste — and no profit motive involved.

1 2 3 NEXT PAGE >SHARE