Can’t Get No Health Care Satisfaction

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via CommonDreams:



Published on Wednesday, July 30, 2008 by the Bangor Daily News (Maine)
Can’t Get No Health Care Satisfaction
by Pat LaMarche


A Fox News anchor said Saturday that if Mick Jagger was from the United States he’d finally qualify for Medicare.

She’s kidding — right?

The anchor made a pretty lame attempt at highlighting the rock star’s advancing age. She did, however, do a good job of pointing out how backward the U.S. health care system is.

See, Mick Jagger’s from the United Kingdom and he’s had universal government medical benefits since he was five. That’s because 60 years ago the United Kingdom instituted their National Health Service.

George Bernard Shaw once said that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.” And that distinctive terminology doesn’t just lend itself to cute little linguistic differences like how they say “lorry” when we say “truck.”

There is also the language used in the U.S. that doesn’t have corresponding lingo in the UK. One example of jargon unique to the U.S. is the term “redlining.” In the U.S., redlining is when an insurance company denies you health care coverage because of a pre-existing condition. In the UK, redlining doesn’t exist.

In fact, according to Health Affairs, “the number one cited health policy journal devoted to publishing original, peer-reviewed research and commentary,” medical redlining is quantified as the “denial rate among applicants for non-group coverage.” Health Affairs lists conditions frequently redlined and the rates at which people are denied access to further coverage. Two of the patient subsets most commonly redlined are breast cancer survivors, 43 percent of the time and HIV patients 100 percent of the time.

There’s a neat organization in the world. It’s called the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD. The group consists of 30 member countries that embrace the notion of “democracy” and support a “free market” economy. It used to be called the Organization for European Economic Cooperation and it began as a result of the Marshall Plan - America’s effort to rebuild Europe after World War II. The OECD compiles statistics: Statistics that illuminate the economic conditions and comparatives among their representative democracies.

OECD statistics state that in 2003, the per capita out-of-pocket expenses for healthcare in the U.S. were $722; while in the UK they were only $208. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/07/30/10693/

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