[Faith & Hunger] Paul Krugman: The Myth of Waiting Times for health care

[Dunleamark at aol.com]

Paul Krugman: The Waiting Game
 
 
Paul Krugman straightens out some of the misleading claims made about health  
care waiting times, access to care, and other issues in comparisons of the 
U.S.  to countries with universal health coverage:  
_The Waiting Game, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY  Times_ 
(http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/16/opinion/16krugman.html?hp)  [_Full column_ 
(http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/07/17/0717krugmancol_edit.html) 
]: Being without health insurance is no  big deal. Just ask President Bush. “I 
mean, people have access to health care  in America,” he said last week. “
After all, you just go to an emergency room.”   
This is what you might call callousness with consequences. The White House  
has announced that Mr. Bush will veto a bipartisan plan that would extend  
health insurance ... to an estimated 4.1 million currently uninsured children.  
After all, it’s not as if those kids really need insurance — they can just go  
to emergency rooms, right?... 
Mr. Bush['s] ... willful ignorance here is part of a larger picture: by and  
large, opponents of universal health care paint a glowing portrait of the  
American system that bears as little resemblance to reality as the scare  stories 
they tell about health care in France, Britain, and Canada.  
The claim that the uninsured can get all the care they need in emergency  
rooms is just the beginning. Beyond that is the myth that Americans ... lucky  
enough to have insurance never face long waits... 
Actually, the persistence of that myth puzzles me. ...Fred Thompson ...  
declared recently that “the poorest Americans are getting far better service”  
than Canadians or the British... [H]ow can they get away with pretending that  
insured Americans always get prompt care...?  
A recent article in Business Week put it bluntly: “In reality,... the  
American people are already waiting as long or longer than patients living  with 
universal health-care systems.”... 
[T]he Commonwealth Fund found that America ranks near the bottom among  
advanced countries in terms of how hard it is to get medical attention on  short 
notice... [and] is the worst place ... if you need care after hours or  on a 
weekend.  
We look better when it comes to seeing a specialist or receiving elective  
surgery. But Germany outperforms us even on those measures... 
In Canada and Britain, delays are caused by doctors trying to devote  limited 
medical resources to the most urgent cases. In the United States,  they’re 
often caused by insurance companies trying to save money.  
This can lead to ordeals like the one recently described by Mark Kleiman, a  
professor at U.C.L.A., who nearly died of cancer because his insurer kept  
delaying approval for a necessary biopsy. ... [T]here’s no question that some  
Americans who seemingly have good insurance nonetheless die because insurers  
are trying to hold down their “medical losses” — the industry term for  
actually having to pay for care.  
On the other hand, it’s true that Americans get hip replacements faster  than 
Canadians. But there’s a funny thing about that example, which is used  
constantly as an argument for the superiority of private health insurance over  a 
government-run system: the large majority of hip replacements in the United  
States are paid for by, um, Medicare.  
That’s right: the hip-replacement gap is actually a comparison of two  
government health insurance systems. American Medicare has shorter waits than  
Canadian Medicare (yes, that’s what they call their system) because it has  more 
lavish funding — end of story. The alleged virtues of private insurance  have 
nothing to do with it.  
The bottom line is that the opponents of universal health care appear to  
have run out of honest arguments. All they have left are fantasies: horror  
fiction about health care in other countries, and fairy tales about health  care 
here in America. 






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