Wealthcare: Shucking and Jiving for the Massa

¡Hola! Everybody...
OK! Let’s put aside the bullshit and get to some semblance of truth. We here in the US have the most cumbersome, expensive, and dysfunctional health care system in the free world. We pay more for much less and even countries like Cuba have better health outcomes than we do here in the good old USA.

Yet, we have the neocon Kool-Aid drinkers actually advocating against their own self-interest. Watch the video and check out getting the Canadian health care system right. This here is the undiluted truth, people. No Kool-Aid and sugar-free...

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-=[ Wealthcare ]=-

We’re all corporate cheerleaders.

I watch in utter amazement and embarrassment as some Americans go out of their way to advocate against their won self-interest. And like many others, I wonder how it all came to be... How did we all become shills for corporations? Then I heard about Doug Rushkoff's new book Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take it Back, and it hit me. the corporate values of business, profit, and consumerism have so infected our lives that we are no longer can conceptualize life in any other way. We are victims of a dysfunctional societal relationship -- one that has come to seem so normal we are almost incapable of processing of how screwed up it really is.

If you are mugged, as Rushkoff was, your neighbors might be more concerned about property values than your health or safety.

The corporation is our new God -- I call it Korporate Kristianity -- my euphemism for fascism. Let’s take the current health care “debate.” corporations are spending $1.4 million a day to pay thousands of lobbyists to defeat any kind of health care reform. We have all heard the lies and misinformation: from “death panels” to rationing to utter disinformation about other national models. Specifically the Canadian and British models have been mercilessly trashed and misrepresented by a media that’s owned by a handful of (yup) corporations.

So, let’s start with our neighbors from the north in Canada. Let’s look at some of the myths being passed around by the gullible idiots on the right:

First? Numbers, as my friend Will likes to point out, don’t lie. If the only way we compared the two systems was with statistics, there is a clear winner. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to dispute the fact that Canada spends far less money on health care for better outcomes.

But let’s be clear: logic isn’t what is fueling this debate, if it was, we would’ve had a single payer option 15 years ago, when the insurance giants promised they would get their act together. Opponents of such a system cite Canada as the best example of what not to do, so it might prove useful to throw light on some myths about the Canadian system.

Canada's health care system is an unmanageable bureaucracy.

Wrong! The opposite is true: the U.S. has the most bureaucratic health care system in the world. More than 31 percent of every dollar spent on health care in the U.S. goes to paperwork, overhead, CEO salaries, profits, etc. The provincial single-payer system in Canada operates with just a 1 percent overhead. Think about it. It is not necessary to spend a huge amount of money to decide who gets care and who doesn't when everybody is covered.

The Canadian system is more expensive than that of the U.S.

Bullshit! Ten percent of Canada’s GDP is spent on health care for 100 percent of the population. The U.S. spends 17 percent of its GDP but 15 percent of its population has no coverage whatsoever and millions of others have inadequate coverage. Essentially, the U.S. system is significantly more expensive than Canada’s. Part of the reason for this is uninsured and underinsured people in the U.S. still get sick and eventually seek care. People who cannot afford care wait until advanced stages of an illness to see a doctor and then do so through emergency rooms, which cost considerably more than primary care services.

What the American neocon corporate shills don’t realize is that such care costs about $45 billion per year, and someone has to pay it. This is why insurance premiums increase every year for insured patients while co-pays and deductibles also rise rapidly.

Canada's government decides who gets health care and when they get it.

This is the “I don’t want the gub’mint to tell me what to do” argument. While HMOs and other private medical insurers in the U.S. do indeed make such decisions, the only people in Canada to do so are physicians. In Canada, the government has absolutely no say in who gets care or how they get it. Medical decisions are left entirely up to doctors, as they should be.

There are no requirements for pre-authorization whatsoever. If your family doctor says you need an MRI, you get one. In the U.S., if an insurance administrator says you are not getting an MRI, you don't get one no matter what your doctor thinks -- unless, of course, you have the money to cover the cost.

There are long waits for care, which compromise access to care.

Part of the neocon “rationing” scare tactic. There are no waits for urgent or primary care in Canada. There are reasonable waits for most specialists’ care, and much longer waits for elective surgery. Yes, there are those instances where a patient can wait up to a month for radiation therapy for breast cancer or prostate cancer. However, the wait has nothing to do with money, but everything to do with the lack of radiation therapists. Despite such waits, however, it is noteworthy that Canada boasts lower incident and mortality rates than the U.S. for all cancers combined, according to the U.S. Cancer Statistics Working Group and the Canadian Cancer Society. Moreover, fewer Canadians (11.3 percent) than Americans (14.4 percent) admit unmet health care needs.

Canadians are paying out of pocket to come to the U.S. for medical care.

I’ve seen too many neocon twats posting this lie on the internet; let me put it to rest. Most patients who come from Canada to the U.S. for health care are those whose costs are covered by the Canadian governments. If a Canadian goes outside of the country to get services that are deemed medically necessary, not experimental, and are not available at home for whatever reason (e.g., shortage or absence of high tech medical equipment; a longer wait for service than is medically prudent; or lack of physician expertise), the provincial government where you live fully funds your care. Those patients who do come to the U.S. for care and pay out of pocket are those who perceive their care to be more urgent than it likely is. In any case, I don’t see any empirical proof that there are throngs of Canadians fighting to come to our hospitals or moving here en masse to escape their horrible (free and guaranteed) health care system.

Canada’s is socialized medicine! The evil gub’mint runs hospitals and doctors work for the gub’mint.

No, goober, you’re incorrect. Princeton University health economist Uwe Reinhardt says single-payer systems are not “socialized medicine” but “social insurance” systems because doctors work in the private sector while their pay comes from a public source. Most physicians in Canada are self-employed. They are not employees of the government nor are they accountable to the government. Doctors are accountable to their patients only. More than 90 percent of physicians in Canada are paid on a fee-for-service basis. Claims are submitted to a single provincial health care plan for reimbursement, whereas in the U.S., claims are submitted to a multitude of insurance providers. Moreover, Canadian hospitals are controlled by private boards and/or regional health authorities rather than being part of or run by the government.

So, there you have it, the undiluted truth. It might you feel uncomfortable and doesn’t jibe with what your daddy told you, but as Will would say: the numbers don’t lie.

Love You Anyway,

Eddie