Healthcare: America – Best Money Can buy Taiwan – Best Everyone Can Afford –Merge Them
Original Post HERE
I was doing my daily scan of the news both at the Huffington Post, CNN.com, and NYTimes.com and came across a wonderful article that got me thinking. The title of the article is Taiwans Progress on Health Care by Uwe Reinhardt. It is an excellent read. It caught my eye because Fareed Zakaria wrote an article and did an hour long program on CNN that contrasted different countries’ approaches to healthcare. He included Great Britain, Switzerland (which is similar to Obamacare), and Taiwan. Uwe’s article reinforced my belief in a single payer system (Medicare for all) as the most efficient system.
Many like to make the blanket statement that America has the best healthcare system in the world. After-all the international wealthy and heads of states from around the world come here for their treatment. That is true. The statement is shortsighted however. The United States of America has the best healthcare in the world money can buy. As American wages stagnate and healthcare prices inflate more and more Americans were left out of the system causing untimely deaths for those who went undiagnosed and untreated.
Given that we spend more than all countries in the world by a large margin and given that our medical outcomes are not better than most should tell us we were in fact doing something wrong. We needed a change.
Unfortunately companies who benefit from our healthcare chaos and inefficiency used a false sense of patriotism to prevent Americans from seeking or accepting factual information from countries that are performing better at a lower cost for their population. Based on what the Obama administration had been saying during the crafting of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), it is safe to assume that unbeknownst to most, the administration and the major crafters of the legislation looked into what other countries were doing. They also looked at experts that were marginalized but that had data to show why certain policies needed to be in place to make the system more efficient.
Ultimately we got a bill based on the political realities of our corporate power structure. It was not the best bill. Medicare for all would have been significantly less expensive by removing insurance companies from the mix since their sole purpose is to pay a bill while skimming a piece of every premium dollar.
Obamacare is a start. We must ensure that it is maintained and that going forward it is modified into a complete universal healthcare bill. We can start by looking at much of what works in Taiwan and other places and merge it with our excellent research, technologies, and medical professionals.
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