Stupidparty Myth #1—USA has the best healthcare system; thus, why reform?

Stupidparty Healthcare Expertise.

“Shortly before the Missouri primary, Santorum—arguing against Barack Obama’s healthcare law—made some rather startling claims about the medical system in the Netherlands, claiming that 1 in 20 deaths in the country were caused by forced euthanasia, and that elderly Dutch wear bracelets that say ‘do not euthanize me’ and ‘don’t go to the hospital, they go to another country, because they’re afraid because of budget purposes that they will not come out of that hospital if they go into it with sickness.’

“When asked by a Dutch reporter where the candidate had gotten these alarming facts, a campaign spokeswoman would only say, ‘It’s a matter of what’s in his heart.’”http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/04/10/our_favorite_rick_santorum_moments

Are you ready for the Facts? Can you handle the Truth? Time to swallow the blue pill

Are you ready, hey, are you ready for this?
Are you hanging on the edge of your seat?
Out of the doorway the bullets rip
To the sound of the beat

Another one bites the dust
Another one bites the dust
And another one gone, and another one gone
Another one bites the dust
Hey, I’m gonna get you, too
Another one bites the dust

Stupidparty Myth #1—USA has the best healthcare system; thus, why reform?

This is what Stupidparty does not want to reform—USA #46 out of #48:

http://www.bloomberg.com/visual-data/best-an-worst/most-efficient-health-care-countries  *since crafting this Graphic – Bloomberg has posted updated info, putting the USA at #46. This slight improvement likely due to increasing impact of Obamacare.

As you can see, not only is the system lousy; it is far more expensive—with the only exception being Switzerland, which comes in at #9. In terms of percentage of GDP, the USA is in a class of its own.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/29/most-efficient-healthcare_n_3825477.html  

 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/International_Comparison_-_Healthcare_spending_as_%25_GDP.png

There are several key problems with the U.S. healthcare system, one being that even though 49.9m Americans (in 2010) did not have coverage, the rest of us still pay about 50% more than we should.  Absent reform (i.e., Stupidparty plan), the number of Americans without insurance was projected to grow to 67m by 2020 as premiums doubled. This number a) assumes that Stupidparty states stop their attacks on public workers (i.e., no more Stupidparty) and b) does not factor in the ever-decreasing coverage actually provided by most employer-sponsored plans. http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/27/politics/btn-health-care/index.html

Stupidparty states relative to Blue States in % uninsured.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_coverage_in_the_United_States#Estimates_of_the_number_uninsured

 The rest of us still pay about 50% more for healthcare than we should.

 So how did the U.S. end up being 50% more expensive than necessary—in addition to ignoring the needs of the people who cannot afford such usurious pricing? It is all in the History and the Myth.

The History.

Winning the Second World War opened up a Pandora’s box for the Allies. Europe went broke fighting the Nazis, and the biggest concern was social unrest, leading to more and more countries falling under the spine-tingling shadow of Stalin. The American economy was in better shape, having benefitted from Keynesian medicine during a deflationary environment—i.e., the investment in the war effort, on top of the New Deal, put America ahead, and Americans were willing to provide loans (the Marshall Plan) to Europe (debt for Europe) to help mitigate unrest.

Churchill dreaded the implication of millions of people who had put their lives on the line coming home to no jobs, no hope. Stupidparty philosophy would say people without jobs should starve (even veterans), but Churchill had never heard of Stupidparty and was in fact destined to die about thirty years before its birth. So he had another idea. Winston Churchill, a Conservative icon in the USA and Britain, initiated what is now called the welfare state. This included the national health system. The prime motivation was simply to help people who needed help get people back on their feet, and create social stability.

The birth of healthcare in the USA was somewhat different. Its birth has been captured on audiotape. You can hear it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmHTte8jRLk. When policy advisers introduced the concept to President Richard Nixon, he was initially aghast. But when it was explained that insurance would provide the coverage and that plenty of profits could be made, well, he was immediately on board.

The USA started on a more suspect foundation, but how does it remain so far behind the other developed nations? Because of various

The Myths.

Myth #1.

The USA is the best. See charts above.

Myth #2 Obamacare.

Actually, it is the Affordable Care Act—built on old GOP philosophy and enacted by Romney as governor of Massachusetts, the state that now has the lowest number of uninsured and ranks at the top or near the top in various categories of health, as will be illustrated.

Myth #3 Europeans have to pay higher Taxes.

Even when the U.S. mainstream media attempts to do objective analysis, they fall into this trap. When Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN did his earnest and heartfelt analysis comparing the USA to other countries, all his efforts came crumbling down—because he said Europeans pay more taxes, a point you can only make if you put it into perspective. This tax argument implies that Americans are getting healthcare free (since it is often part of a person’s benefit package). At the end of the day, an American is paying 50% more—so calling the European system a tax is just playing with words. If an American company were not responsible for your healthcare and the associated administrative costs, these fees (taxes), that they would no longer have to pay could simply go back into the employee’s paycheck.

Myth #4 Obamacare is a government takeover.

No, it is not.

Myth #5 The public option is a government takeover.

Since the Stupidparty failed to change the title in an Orwellian fashion, to the “public death panel option” (as they tried to!!!!!! with the Affordable Care Act), it is really a mystery how Stupidparty Disciples can get so confused. Well, maybe not such a mystery when one considers the massive amount of misinformation put out by lobbyists, Stupidparty reps, and their Benefactors.

The public option is in fact remarkably simple. You would merely have the option of buying insurance from the government. Nobody is forcing you to opt out of your current plans. The Stupidparty feared the public option because they realized that mathematical logic would over time drive consumers eagerly to reevaluating the single-payer approach (an approach that could still allow people to buy healthcare from the private market). The reform we ended up with, while vital, is far less satisfactory and far more complex—all in order to keep Benefactors well fed. Math was mainly overpowered by Myth.

Sometimes I hear businessmen complaining about Obamacare. But unless they advocated for the public option or the single payer, these businessmen deserve no sympathy, this is their fault. However Business should not be forced to do this task. It is a tremendous waste of their resources.

So why is the U.S. system so inefficient?

• Insurance companies can only pay out about $65 for every $100 in premium.
• Individual insurance companies have less clout to bring down costs of medicine and medical care.
• Doctors’ offices employ an array of people and systems to figure out coverage and co-insurance issues, chase down the disputes, the nonpayers, liaising with multiple insurance companies, each with its own rules, etc.
• Hospitals likewise devote massive resources to coverage issues, disputes and chasing nonpayers, and dealing with people with no resources.
• Because so many people do not have coverage, they cannot get preventive measures; thus, by the time they’re up in the emergency room, their condition is more severe, making more it difficult to get back to work, to look after kids or other family members or save their own business.
• The U.S. health system has another major drawback, which hurts not only people without coverage but also those with coverage or those who may be owed money by others……

Bankruptcy—barely an issue in Europe. As many as 62% of bankruptcies were caused by medical costs, according to a Harvard study. Close to three out of four health-cost related bankruptcies are filed by people who had insurance—just not good enough insurance enough to cover the high costs of modern medical care. “I may see a $100,000 bill covered by insurance—but it comes with a $20,000 co-pay,” Rose said. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/american_journal_of_medicine_09.pdf

Myth #6.

Bankruptcy no big deal, only 1% a year.

Actually, 1% is a big deal when you put this number in its proper perspective, Assume someone has a working career of thirty-five years; this would mean that person has a 35% chance of going bankrupt. Are you happy with those odds?

Myth #? (no number, as it is not an obvious myth): cancer-survivor rates.

So now Stupidparty Disciples fall back onto one rather dubious argument, that U.S. cancer-survival rates are better. But this is highly dubious.

While it appears that U.S. rates are generally better than in Europe (only if you are insured), Dr. Otis Brawley, the chief medical officer and executive vice president at the American Cancer Society (in commenting on a paper written by Tomas Philipson, of the University of Chicago, with others), said that it “has a huge fatal flaw in it. . . . When you look at survival from time of diagnosis to time of death and you have a screened population that has a lot of diagnoses, you’re filling that population with people who don’t need treatment and because they are over-diagnosed, they have very long survival,” he added. http://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2012/04/09/cancer-care-costs-higher-in-us-than-europe-but-survival-longer

 But even with that caution in mind, survival rates in Canada, Japan, Australia, and Cuba were all comparable to or higher than U.S. rates on all types of cancer except for prostate. The prostrate-cancer exception is also likely due to aggressive screening picking up cases that actually never need to be treated (and unnecessary treatment comes with its own problems)—thus, one is not comparing apples to apples.

Dr. Marie Diener-West, a professor of biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, told us that it would be a stretch to draw too many conclusions from comparing survival rates. “Part of the problem with the comparison is that it might not actually be comparable populations,” she said. “It could be [one is] an older population, it could be they have more comorbidities [other conditions] that are affecting their survival in addition to cancer, there could be occupational differences. There are many different factors that could be playing a role.”http://www.factcheck.org/2009/08/cancer-rates-and-unjustified-conclusions/

How does one explain such massive levels of confusion? The Stupidparty strategically just wants to destroy Obama. They do not really care how. The method is misrepresentation; the driving force is the money from the Benefactors, and the conduits are Fox “news,” non-sport talk radio (what many people refer to as hate radio), and paid-off congressmen. All of this will be properly illustrated in later chapters.

Personally, and outside of satellite radio and NPR, I have yet to come across, on a regular basis, any talk radio that actually benignly cultivates the mind. From my experience, it invariably cultivates fear, zero objectivity, questionable information—creating fertile ground for increased fundamentalism and bigotry. Because of this, I rarely listen to terrestrial talk radio anymore. This may explain why there will no chapter devoted to the characters that dominate that media.

Curtain Call. – -Oh alright, just one more time:

Are you ready, hey, are you ready for this?
Are you hanging on the edge of your seat?
Out of the doorway the bullets rip
To the sound of the beat

Another one bites the dust
Another one bites the dust
And another one gone, and another one gone
Another one bites the dust
Hey, I’m gonna get you, too
Another one bites the dust