Health care reform is by far the most important issue the Congress will have voted on since FDR tried to rebuild the US after the 1929 financial crash and ensuing depression.
An example: in Denmark, where I am from, we have "free" health care:
- That means that we pay nothing for seeing a general practitioner or a hospital of our choice, whether we're having surgery or are giving birth.
- The state negotiates with the drug companies to press down the price (for buying in bulk) and pays a part of the citizens' medicine bill when they go to the pharmacy. This means that as soon as you have spent the limit of a few hundred dollars on medicine out of your own wallet each year, the state pays all later medicine bills for the rest of the year in order to protect people with health care problems that require expensive medicine (often elderly people with pension as their only steady income). For a woman in the fertile age, that means that your birth control pills are kept at a very affordable price (in fact, the price has actually FALLEN the last 15 years!!!). And that means that I pay 3 times - THREE TIMES! - as much for a little birth control pill over here than I did in Denmark!
So yes, the state pays. The citizens don't spend any time worrying about paper work or health care bills. The GP, specialist or hospital has had electronic patient journals since 1994 (nationally co-ordinated since 1996) and passes on the bill for their work directly to the state that covers the expenses with one of the highest tax rates in the world. But the Danes do also get a lot for their tax money. They never worry about their or their family's health, they get free education from first day of elementary school through university AND money to pay for books and rent while they study. State supported nursery care and kindergarten, high minimum wages, lots of vacation and parental rights.
And yes, there are waiting lists: 1 month for non lethal conditions which don't prevent people from working and don't get worse if they wait. You can chose any doctor (General Practitioner as well as specialists) and any hospital, public or private, even hospitals in Germany and Sweden. The state pays no matter what. People with rare illnesses are better off being treated in hospitals in Sweden and Germany because the Danish population is too small to give the doctors enough experience with rare operation and cancer cases. That is why the Danish state still pays when you get surgery abroad.
To me that proves that the Americans get too little for their health care money.
It's not all free though.
A visit to the dentist is free until you're 18. After that it gets expensive because the state illogically does not cover your dentist bill. This is why many Danes above 18 years of age get their complex dentist work done in Sweden and Poland, where they pay about half of what the Danish dentists want for the same procedure. But at least the free child dental care is the reason why almost no Danes in their 30's and younger have any fillings, and no one in the same age range need braces.
Same goes for psychology: it's free until you're 18. And as illogical as the dental care that you have to pay for it afterwards.
Nonetheless, some Danes do get private health insurance. About 10% of people in the work force, typically the top ten percent (CEOs and other people that have special value to a company) get private health insurance via their job, so that they can be treated immediately at a hospital if they need surgery. Some companies offer this to employees whose job can't easily be taken over by someone else if they get ill. E.g. all professional sports people have it.
The problem in Denmark is that it is slowly developing into the American system:
The number of private hospitals is increasing in an evil spiral because doctors and nurses flee to the private sector to avoid the busy work conditions and working overtime at the public hospitals. And there's the wage difference. So the more private hospitals Denmark allows to open, the worse the situation at the public hospitals get, and the contrast between private and public gets starker. Which again forces the government to pay for letting ever more people being treated at the private hospitals to fulfill the promise of getting surgery within a month.
My mother cried with despair when she was treated at a private hospital some years ago. Not because she was treated horribly at the private hospital. But because it was SO different than the way her old, dying mother was treated at the public hospital a few years earlier. The treatment she got at the private hospital was how she remembered the public hospitals used to be back when there were no private hospitals in Denmark (the first private hospital opened in 1990, but according to Ugeskrift for Læger (Weekly Publication for Doctors) they lost money until 2002, the right wing government took office in November 2001.
That leads me to the point:
The US needs to invest in the health of its citizens in order to have productive people that can generate income for decades while at the same time being as little a burden to the public health care system as possible. America can save a ton of money if it invests in the health of its people. Prevention is always way cheaper than repair. Imagine what all the money the state will save in the mid to long run can do to further develop this country: increase the average education level, improve the environment and free money to research and investment in green technology so that US can be on top of the list instead of somewhere behind Denmark, Germany and Spain, at least when it comes to wind technology.
The Danish government apparently can't see that it is destroying something very valuable while trying to copy a failed American health care system! Learn from Denmark's successes and mistakes!
Links
Health Action Now
HHS's healthcare reform site
CNN on Obama's health care reform
OECD Health Data 2009, Denmark compared
Boston Globe: Plenty of countries get health care right
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