Some labor under the misapprehension that if the United States adopts a system of universal health care, then everyone will be forced to partake of it. This is not true. People with doctors and insurance companies that they like are welcome to stay with them. Doctors may choose to work outside of the system. However, something needs to be in place for the rapidly growing number of uninsured Americans: 46 million and growing. History judges civilizations by how well they take care of their weakest members--the children, the elderly, the poor, the sick.

The New Yorker Magazine recently reported exactly what circumstances led many other nations to instate national health care, and explains why it is now in the best interests of the United States to follow suit. This is a five page article, but extremely informative and pertinent; especially from mid page three to the end. Click here to read the article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/26/090126fa_fact_gawande or read a synopsis at http://earthlyhappenings.blogspot.com/2009/01/us-national-health-care-or-bust.html 

Americans pay more than people in any other country for medical care, and receive less of that care for their money. Why? Because private health insurance companies and so-called managed care providers do a very good job of making both health care and health insurance prohibitively expensive, not only for patients to receive, but also for doctors to deliver, according to an empirical study published this month in Pediatrics journal. Below is summary of the findings, and the whole story is available from NPR's Morning Edition. The radio story is only about 5 minutes long, so we can all get informed in the time it takes to drink a cup of coffee.

All things negotiable: "A study published in Pediatrics journal found that there was an exceedingly wide variation not only in what pediatricians and family practitioners paid for vaccines, but also in the reimbursements they received from insurers and managed care organizations."

Doctors are losing money, but investors probably aren't. "Dr. Gary Freed of the University of Michigan Health Systems says he undertook a study of physician costs associated with childhood immunization because he kept hearing complaints from physicians that they couldn't make ends meet and were losing money on immunizations."

What is your health worth? Some physicians are paying three times as much as others for the exact same vaccine. "By the same token, we found that some physicians were being reimbursed twice as much as other physicians for the same vaccine. So, some were paying too much and getting reimbursed too little," Freed said.

Want to hear something even more frightening? "At least a fifth of family practitioners say they can no longer afford to vaccinate children, which can be a problem particularly in rural areas of the country where there are often no alternatives." The United States can't be a first world country if it's citizens have third world medical care. The time has come to stop private health insurance companies from interfering with health care.

The United States is the only first-world nation without a universal system of doctors and medical clinics. Many Americans currently have two options when it comes to good health:

1) Be wealthy.

2) Don't get sick.

Having lived in (and gotten sick in) a few different countries, I can provide first-hand accounts of how health care works in countries with national health systems in place. England, France, and Canada are often cited as prime examples of how nationalized health care systems can work. The Frontline show entitled, "Sick Around the Word" explains how other countries manage the health of their citizenry very well. The DVD is listed to the right and comes highly recommended. Meanwhile, based on some of my own travels, here are three different examples of what it is like to be a patient in Australia, Japan, and China.

Australia:

I lived in Australia a college student. I caught a couple of nasty flu germs while there. I also found myself in need of several different medications and some nutritional advice (I needed to learn how to eat a healthy and balanced diet on a starving student budget). The national health service provided me with all of these things. I could walk into which ever doctor's office I wanted to, be seen and treated immediately, spend time talking with the doctors, be handed medicine right away, and be seen quickly and easilly for follow-up appointments. I even got regular check-ups. How much did this cost? You may well ask. It cost almost nothing. I would pay the office about AU$10-30, then stroll up to kiosk in the shopping center on my way home, wait in line for a few minutes, and get reimbursed about 80% of my initial outlay in brightly-colored Australian cash.

Japan:

I worked in Japan for several years and ended up paying less in taxes than I do when working in the United States. Suffering from a chronic illness and frequent colds and flues at the time, I was thankful to have ready access to government-funded medical clinics and hospitals. As a permanent resident, I received a seemingly magical little plastic card that gave me access to all of the medical care I needed at a tiny fraction of what I pay in the U.S. of A. When I had an ear ache, a coworker drove me to a nearby clinic and I was seen and given medication, advice, and comfort within 10 minutes. When I sprained my ankle on a hike, a friend drove me to a beautiful nearby hospital where I was being examined, listened to, advised, x-rayed for breaks, and given anti-inflamatories within 20 minutes.

China:

I travel frequently throughout Asia for both pleasure and business, and suffered from a painful case of food poisoning once while in Bejing. It was 2:00 AM and I was on the floor crying in pain. The staff at my hotel hailed a taxi, inserted me into it, and gave the driver some instructions. I was then taken on a hair-raising ride across the city to, of all things, a large shopping mall. The taxi driver helped me into the otherwise empty mall and into a 24-7 medical clinic. I didn't even have both feet across the threshold before a doctor was ready to help. He spoke English, gave me something to settle my stomache, painkillers, and a full check-up (he noticed that I had had the aforementioned ear infection). The clinic charged me the equivalent of US$20 for everything and called me a cab.

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Earthly Happenings, discussing quality of life, social responsibility, equal rights, and environmental and economic sustainability.

"Socialism" is one of those words that has been tossed around in the same way as "poltergeist" or "boogeyman".  However, if lay fear aside for a moment and consider what a socialist system really is, we will see that several of them are fully functional in the highly capitalist United States.  Simply put, a socialist system is one in which people pay into and share the benefits thereof as needed.  Examples include the police, fire departments, county hospitals and clinics, utilities, roads, highways, public transit, and public schools.  If all chip in for those important services, why not for something as important as health? 

Assembly Health Committee Chair Dave Jones (Sacramento, CA) has discovered that insurance companies are discriminating against women in California by charging them more than men for health insurance in the individual market (when people don’t get insurance from an employer and buy it on their own.) Jones says research done by his office found in some cases women in California pay more than twice as much as men for coverage. So, he’s written a bill that would outlaw the practice. “If we start going down the road of allowing gender or ethnicity or race for example to determine what we are going to be charged for health care, I just think that’s a bad road to go down,” Jones says. Click here to listen to the radio report by Kelley Weiss!