Reports: Passing Universal Healthcare Could Kill The GOP

www.huffingtonpost.com/2008 /11/22/reports-passing-univ ers...

“Barack Obama's selection of Tom Daschle as Health and Human Services Secretary, as well as "health reform czar," signals that the incoming president is serious about passing comprehensive healthcare reform. Over at the think tank Cato, Michael Cannon warns that blocking any such legislation is vital for the GOP's survival (h/t Kos):
Ditto Baucus' health plan. And Kennedy's. And Wyden's.

Why? Norman Markowitz, a contributing editor at PoliticalAffairs.net (motto: "Marxist Thought Online"), makes an interesting point about how making citizens dependent on the government for their medical care can change the fates of political parties:
A "single payer" national health system - known as "socialized medicine" in the rest of the developed world - should be an essential part of the change that the core constituencies which elected Obama desperately need. Britain serves as an important political lesson for strategists. After the Labor Party established the National Health Service after World War II, supposedly conservative workers and low-income people under religious and other influences who tended to support the Conservatives were much more likely to vote for the Labor Party...
James Pethokoukis, at U.S. News and World Report, draws the same conclusion as Cannon does from Markowitz's analysis of how universal healthcare changed the political dynamic in Britain:
The GOP strategist had been joking about the upcoming presidential election and giving his humorous assessments of the candidates. Then he suddenly cut out the schtick and got scary serious. "Let me tell you something, if Democrats take the White House and pass a big-government healthcare plan, that's it. Game over. Government will dominate the economy like it does in Europe. Conservatives will spend the rest of their lives trying to turn things around and they will fail..."

...Recently, I stumbled across this analysis of how nationalized healthcare in Great Britain affected the political environment there. As Norman Markowitz in Political Affairs, a journal of "Marxist thought," puts it: "After the Labor Party established the National Health Service after World War II, supposedly conservative workers and low-income people under religious and other influences who tended to support the Conservatives were much more likely to vote for the Labor Party when health care, social welfare, education and pro-working class policies were enacted by labor-supported governments."

Passing Obamacare would be like performing exactly the opposite function of turning people into investors. Whereas the Investor Class is more conservative than the rest of America, creating the Obamacare Class would pull America to the left. Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, who first found that wonderful Markowitz quote, puts it succinctly in a recent blog post: "Blocking Obama's health plan is key to the GOP's survival."“

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Firstly I want to mention that my understanding of the Obama national health care plan is that people will have the option of staying with what they have OR opting into the system. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong or if your interpretation is different (I know you will anyway).

I've been in the US for 14 years and I knew before I came over here that I was going to have to deal with private health care.

(FYI, I've never heard of National Health care refered to as "socialised medicine" anywhere BUT the United States - it was never refered to as socialised medicine in the UK in the thirty years I lived there ).

I initially worked for Sony Electronic Entertainment in Santa Monica, and by all accounts we were supposed to have a "pretty good" health care package.

I studiously avoided having to go to the doctor by not being ill. However, I am an asthma sufferer, and I knew that my NHS (socialised medicine) issue inhaler would give up on me eventually.

Fortunately the climate in California is such that i rarely needed to usd my "asthma blaster" and I didn't come down with a cold or flu as is practically inevitable in the UK in the winter.

So I was able to put off the doctor's visit until about mid 1995, when the last puff of Ventolin was gone.At the time I had no idea that I could buy an off-the-shelf for $15 item called Bronchaid, which contains a nasty blend of napalm, strichnine and sulphuric acid. It clears the airways by bleaching them.

Coincidentally I had just seenJerry Seinfeld on TV talking about how long one waits at the doctor in the waiting room before you get sent into the other waiting room.

This is exactly what happened to me when I went to see the doc in Santa Monica. I arrived at the rather swanky doctor's office, where I was invited to fill out various forms.

I then waited nearly an hour after my appointed time, even though I'd shown up early, and was then led to the other waiting room where I waited over half an hour.

To add to the full tragi-comic effect, I was even priveleged to overhear two doctors discussing their golf games.

Upon leavign I haded over a sum of cash. I don't recall how much it was back in 1995. There's days it's ten bucks each time I see my regular doc (who, by the way, is fantastic!)

How would it have been different in a "socialised medicine" situation?

Bear in mind that this is my experience and others may have better or worse experiences.

Changing doctors - easy - all my files were transfered from on GP's office to another (GP = general practitioner).

Appointment and waiting time. Generally I would see the doctor within a few minutes of my appointed time. Generally waiting room would be pretty much full, so I imagine I nust have been quite lucky as far as getting to see the doctor promptly.

Forms to fill out - don't recall having to do much of that.

The other waiting room - there isn't one. You go into the doc's office and tell him your symtoms and he presribes a course of leeches.

Not really - it's pretty much the same there as It is here, although my mother insists that the doctors spend all their time looking at the computer instead of looking at the patient. Are we called patients in the US, or have they started refering to us as "guests" or "clients"?

Payment.

Er...I already paid with my national Insurance contributions.

Prescriptions - varies, but I think there's a cap on the cost. It was around seven pounds maximum back in 1994.

Quality of care - varies. I've heard some negative stories, especially from my mother, about what she considers to be bad doctors. Not as bad as the story my cousin told me thoguh - she was one of Doctor Harold Shipman's patients. She was wrongly diagnosed and given incorrect treatments by him for a couple of years which resulted in her having to have most of her bowel removed.

I would say Shipman, who killed over 200 people, is less typical of the treatment in the NHS.

Could a Dr Shipman serial killer situation happen in the US? Of course it could. There are probably dozens of them out there.

I'm lucky to have a great doctor, she's a gem. However I've had a fair number of quacks since I've been in L.A., not least my dermatologist who, apart from than owning seven vintage Rolls-Royces, make jokes about my ailment and offered nothing in the way of a diagnosis or teatment. I don't want to be told that "it could be this or it could be that but we have no real way of knowing" by someone who claims to specialise in the science of skin medicine.

Rubbish.

Then there was the dentist who butchered my mouth to the point that I would rather have extreme toothache than ever return to him. He did two root canals, each of which I have to have redone by my new and vastly more expensive but extremely competent Egyptian dentist.

UK dentistry - well I'm sure you all love the urban myths, but the first dentist i visited here in L.A. was very impressed with the work that had been done, and asked who my previous dentist was - when I told him it was done in the UK for free (this was before dentists in the Uk stopped doing NHS work) he nearly fell over in shock. I guess that myth has deep...roots.

Bureaucracy - the British NHS has a vast bureacracy and money has been notoriously badly mismanaged, case in point the 500 quid per square yard hand woven carpet in the lobby of one government building.

I'm not sure if that has been improved upon since the horrendous wates of the late eighties and early nineties (when the Conservatives were in charge and making a real mess of semi-privatising things).

Bureacracy in the private health system in the US..? Well let's put it this way - you generally don't get refused treatment in the UK system. I think we all know the nightmare of bureacracy in US healthcare. It's MENTAL!

That's not just from my perspective, either. I dated someone from HealthNet for some time and she informed me on a regular basis of the bungles, the edicts and horrendous cases where people were refused treatment through one small print loophole or another.

The giant health care businesses in the US are there to make money - you don't make money by paying for someone's operation, hospital stay or drug treatment.

Is there any kind of watchdog organisation that governs quality of medical care or cleanliness in the USA?

When I was going through my green card process I had to go to a clinic to get blood taken. Why this couldn't be done at the doctor's office , which at least maintained an aura of sterility and cleanliness, I cannot imagine.

I went to a clinic on Ventura Boulevard and was shocked by the filthiness of this place. Outside of documentaries about Third World AIDS clinics, I had never experienced such grime and filth in a place perporting to be a medical establishment. I've just read Hitchens' book "The Missionary Position" about that old fraud Mother Theresa and her vile homes for the poor - the clinic on Ventura was marginally better in that it didn't contain rows of cots containing skeletal indigents.

When I was led into the other waiting room I was impressed and encouraged to see that there was no time wasted in mopping up blood spills from previous er...clients. There it was - blood on the couch, the walls, the floor.

It was a confidence building experience that absolutely solidified my faith in the American private health care system.

Would that havehappened in the UK?

I very much doubt it. I doubt it would have happened anywhere in modern Western Europe.

Waiting times - in the UK I understand that waiting times for operations can be several months.

On the other hand my step-dad had to wait a month for his knee operation. Is that bad? He could still get around with a walking stick. he didn't need a wheelchair.

And he got given some great painkillers that he could have really enjoyed if he had added alcohol (but didn't).

So that's my experience.

If you're scared for whatever reason of "socialised medicine" I really don't know why. The US has been slipping down the world scale of health care quality for years, and I believe it's ranked lower than many countries that have a solid and established national health care system in place.

IMHO there are a few things that should be free at the point of use, and health care is one of them. In a genuinely civilised modern country it's a basic human right, not a privelege. People in the UK complain endlessly about the NHS, but that's the thing I've noticed about other countries - they want to make things better. If you complain about anything in the US you get labeled as an anti-American, not a patriot, or any other number of spurious labels. If you go with the status quo and object to nothing, then you're a RealMercan (TM).

The NHS in Britain is largely considered to be a national treasure - if not, it would have been done away with years ago and there'd be a US style private system in place.

Thanks for bothering to read this.