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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (262343)	4/22/2008 10:25:50 PM
From: geode00	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The US system is the most expensive per capita in the world even though it doesn't even cover all the capita. For this amount of money, we don't even get the best results which should make all capitalists really angry. It is too cheap in Japan and out of control in the US. If we look at healthcare today like the US cars of 30 years ago, maybe we'd get the idea that something really bad is going on here. --------------- 'Frontline' offers prescription for U.S. health-care crisis By Joanne Ostrow The Denver Post April 14, 2008 Click here to find out more! T.R. Reid is an affable traveling companion. Whether eating sushi in Japan, drinking beer in Germany or receiving acupuncture in Taiwan, he gets to the heart of a complicated debate with simple, personal questions. "Would you say most British people go their whole lives and never get a medical bill?" he asks the CEO of a British hospital. "How many people in Switzerland go bankrupt because of medical bills?" he asks the country's president. (None. It would be a "huge scandal" if anyone did, he learns.) The premise of his globe-trotting research is simple: American health care is in crisis, and there's a world of experience out there that could teach us how to fix it. He explores five of the world's richest capitalist countries to figure out what works. In Sick Around the World, airing Tuesday on PBS, he discovers a wide range of options — some too slow, some too expensive, some too meddlesome for American tastes. He encounters a few ideas the U.S. might want to borrow. You've heard the back-and-forth among the presidential candidates here. But did you know an overnight stay in a Japanese hospital costs $10, or $90 for a private room? That pregnant women in Germany pay nothing for prenatal care? That clinics are open on weekends in Taiwan, with no waiting? Reid is writing a book on the subject, due in January. "There's a world of experience out there that we're not taking advantage of," he said in a phone interview. "This bugs me." In this collaboration with Frontline, Reid travels to Germany, Taiwan, Switzerland, England and Japan to assess how each rich capitalist country delivers health care. The author, public radio commentator and veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent uses his bum shoulder to launch conversations, but mostly he's a detached onlooker in various ERs and hospitals. He brings a sense of mirth, even mischief, to his probings of other cultures. And a dose of mirthful mischief is what you need when the subject is as eye-glazing as health care. Reid demonstrates his fluency in multiple languages as he travels. As former Tokyo and London bureau chief, he knows the pitfalls of the "ferociously capitalist" system in Japan, and the drawbacks of the government-run National Health Service in England. Ultimately, he concludes, the ideas about health care that he discovered in his travels aren't really so foreign. "For veterans, we're Britain. For seniors on Medicare, we're Taiwan. And for working people with insurance, we're Germany." The countries he visited "have settled on one model for everybody which is fairer and cheaper" than the current U.S. situation. The question is, "Do we have the political will to make the change?" We let 20,000 of our neighbors die every year because they can't get health care. We let 7,000 Americans go bankrupt every year. Yet Americans are fearful of so-called socialized medicine.

To: TimF who wrote (262343)	4/22/2008 10:26:41 PM
From: geode00	Respond to of 281500

US doctors support universal health care - survey Mon Mar 31, 2008 5:00pm EDT WASHINGTON, March 31 (Reuters) - More than half of U.S. doctors now favor switching to a national health care plan and fewer than a third oppose the idea, according to a survey published on Monday. The survey suggests that opinions have changed substantially since the last survey in 2002 and as the country debates serious changes to the health care system. Of more than 2,000 doctors surveyed, 59 percent said they support legislation to establish a national health insurance program, while 32 percent said they opposed it, researchers reported in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. The 2002 survey found that 49 percent of physicians supported national health insurance and 40 percent opposed it. "Many claim to speak for physicians and represent their views. We asked doctors directly and found that, contrary to conventional wisdom, most doctors support national health insurance," said Dr. Aaron Carroll of the Indiana University School of Medicine, who led the study. "As doctors, we find that our patients suffer because of increasing deductibles, co-payments, and restrictions on patient care," said Dr. Ronald Ackermann, who worked on the study with Carroll. "More and more, physicians are turning to national health insurance as a solution to this problem." PATCHWORK The United States has no single organized health care system. Instead it relies on a patchwork of insurance provided by the federal and state governments to the elderly, poor, disabled and to some children, along with private insurance and employer-sponsored plans. Many other countries have national plans, including Britain, France and Canada, and several studies have shown the United States spends more per capita on health care, without achieving better results for patients. An estimated 47 million people have no insurance coverage at all, meaning they must pay out of their pockets for health care or skip it. Contenders in the election for president in November all have proposed various changes, but none of the major party candidates has called for a fully national health plan. Insurance companies, retailers and other employers have joined forces with unions and other interest groups to propose their own plans. "Across the board, more physicians feel that our fragmented and for-profit insurance system is obstructing good patient care, and a majority now support national insurance as the remedy," Ackermann said in a statement. The Indiana survey found that 83 percent of psychiatrists, 69 percent of emergency medicine specialists, 65 percent of pediatricians, 64 percent of internists, 60 percent of family physicians and 55 percent of general surgeons favor a national health insurance plan. The researchers said they believe the survey was representative of the 800,000 U.S. medical doctors. (Reporting by Maggie Fox; Editing by Will Dunham and Xavier Briand) ------------ Our system is so out of control that even the insured are being denied claims. Again, we are headed towards 20% of GDP going to health care. Who the hell is that sick?