There Is A Better Way To Do Health Care in America

Health care in the United States is a crisis of epic proportion. Every day, premiums and prescription costs go up. Employers have to pay more to cover their workers and people are being priced out of having health care or those that can afford it aren't given much with the way deductibles force people to pay for treatment anyway. Michael Moore's SiCKO helped shine the light on this problem, but unfortunately in our society something in the public eye today can vanish tomorrow even if the problem persists. That is what politicians who are in bed with the health care industry count on. They detest stories like these and as you can see, the media is right there with them. They do not want you to see that there is a better way (though worse for their profits) to provide health care and tonight, PBS is going to show you how several other industrialized countries help their citizens.

From PBS's Frontline:

Four in five Americans say the U.S. health care system needs “fundamental” change. Can the U.S. learn anything from the rest of the world about how to run a health care system, or are these nations so culturally different from us that their solutions would simply not be acceptable to Americans? FRONTLINE correspondent T.R. Reid examines first-hand the health care systems of other advanced capitalist democracies--UK, Germany, Switzerland, Japan and Taiwan--to see what tried and tested ideas might help us reform our broken health care system.[...]

FRONTLINE teams up with T.R. Reid, a veteran foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, to find out how five other capitalist democracies--United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland--deliver health care and what the United States might learn from their successes and their failures. In Sick Around the World, airing Tuesday, April 15, 2008, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS (check local listings), Reid turns up remarkable differences in how these countries handle health care--from Japan, where a night in a hospital can cost as little as $10, to Switzerland, where the president of the country tells Reid it would be a "huge scandal" if someone were to go bankrupt from medical bills.

There are faults to these systems, but in our media those are amplified in order to scare people away from different ideas than a strictly for-profit health care industry. Watch Frontline tonight and see for yourself that we can treat Americans who are sick in a different way and that as countries adopt national health care, the partisanship of the issue fades away. We deserve that here and we need to let our elected officials know that...and if they don't hear us, elect new ones that will.

Majority Of Doctors Now Support Nationalized Health Care

The debate for national health care isn't new in this country. Way back at the tail end of the New Deal era, President Truman tried to initiate a national health care plan like our brethren in Europe did at the time but the AMA helped to crush that in its infancy by "reaching out" to their doctors. Since then health care has become corporatized and we all know how that has been going. The insurance industry has also added considerable woes to the way medicine is practiced and not only patients have begun to realize it.

From RawStory:

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."

It is the solution to this problem. Clearly the "free market" has done nothing but enrich a few corporate executives at the top of the health industry food chain and penalized the rest of us as a result. It is time to make a change and a nationalized health care system is that change.