It’s a widespread fallacy, exemplified recently on PBS’s “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” to believe all bars to needed health care would disappear if we could just move from private insurance companies to government financing.
One of a number of voters being interviewed in New Jersey said on the show she was “concerned that, with a private system, what we have seen with our current insurance system is, there’s no equity. And equity’s important to me. I think we have a moral obligation to provide basic health care to all. And I do not want an insurance company making medical decisions for me. I want to make those decisions with my doctor.”
I’d like this concerned woman to learn about Olive Beal, a 108-year-old former piano teacher in England who was told a while back by the British Health Services that, yes, she could have the hearing aid she needed but, sorry, she’d have to wait a year and a half. Beal is not alone, according to one news account. Literally hundreds of thousands of British elderly are put off for long periods up to two years in receiving hearing devices that could help restore a vital part of their lives.
The simple truth is that some system of rationing is required when health care is provided mostly free beyond taxation. The demand invariably will be for huge, unaffordable, ultimately unavailable amounts of care.
Single-payer, government-financed systems are notorious for draconian responses, such as forcing people into long lines even in some instances when it can be fatal to postpone treatment. Right now in England, some doctors are arguing the government should deny operations to people who have smoked too much, drank too much, are very fat or are very old.
For the United States to convert to a like system would be on the order of a nuttiness that might be rectified by looking hard at our government-financed system for the elderly, Medicare.
It consumes a huge percentage of the budget, it’s now in debt by an incredible $32 trillion, and, at some point after baby boomers start retiring en masse, could come to absorb so much federal spending as to leave a pittance for anything else. Do what some want to do – put the whole nation under Medicare or something akin to it – and you will have manufactured the mother of all fiscal crises.
Despite this, the two remaining Democratic candidates for president have argued for systems that edge us in that direction – if falling short at the outset – when you could provide more easily obtainable health insurance through health savings accounts and tax credits given to individuals instead of to employers at no or little additional cost, as President Bush has recommended.
For the sake of improved health care for everyone, there is a need to act, although the overheated rhetoric on the issue usually fails to mention public hospitals, public health care clinics, the fact that most people without insurance are without it for a relatively short period of time or the fact that many people are without it of their own volition, not because of harsh circumstances. Don’t forget, either, that we have Medicaid for the poorest among us.
What’s unneeded is a confused conviction that the socialized medicine in Britain and elsewhere is vastly superior to our system, which, however flawed, is in many ways better even prior to enhancements that would make insurance more nearly universal.
By the way, Olive Beal got her hearing aid. It was a private physician who gave it to her.
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He may be reached at [email protected]
