It depends on your definition, which depends on your objectivity.
This being an election season, GOP candidates are tripping over themselves to condemn any Democratic candidate’s platform as ‘socialized medicine’. Great soundbite, but what exactly does that mean?
And are the Clinton Edwards Richardson and Obama platforms ‘socialist’ approaches to health care?
Not exactly.
Maggie Mahar has done an excellent job deconstructing the soundbite. Her key point – describing medicine as ‘socialized’ implies providers are government employees. By this definition, none of the EU systems is ‘socialized’: non-hospital providers are independent business folks.
Perhaps FrudyMitt is confused, and thinks a governmental requirement that citizens have health insurance is somehow ‘socialism’. One could view this as an intrusion of government into one’s personal space, or alternatively, preventing individuals from intruding into each others’. But it is NOT socialized medicine.
Mahar cites this definition: ” ‘socialized medicine’ is when the doctors are state employees; when the hospitals, drugstores, home health agencies and other facilities are owned and controlled by the government”
That’s as good a definition as I’ve ever read. But most people don’t care about hair-splitting definitions when they already know what they want.
And IMO most people already know that they want a single-payer health care system, even though what most people really mean, but don’t know that they mean it, is a single-payer health-insurance system but never mind that technicality because everyone knows that a single payer whatever-it-is will fix our broken health care delivery system, and even if it doesn’t, people won’t need to worry any more that health care is expensive because the government or someone else will pay for it, so when they want any kind of health service it will be provided to them by the world’s best professionals and paid for without serious challenge at nominal or zero personal cost to them, and that will mean we all live longer, healthier lives, we can drink and eat whatever we wish, infant mortality will disappear and, oh yeah, all our children will grow to be handsome and above average, and even though the experts disagree sometimes sharply over the impact of a single-payer whatever-it-is, and, even though people don’t really care to know the totality of other countries experience, that doesn’t matter because everyone knows single-payer whatever-it-is works better than whatever it is we have now according to Michael Moore and his sources and therefore “it” would be better than what we have so what we have must be replaced as soon as possible – Medico delendum est. (we probably need a definition of “it” that can be ignored equally widely as the definition of “socialized medicine”).
Something like that.
So I think there is no doubt that socialized something-or-other is coming to the U.S. And that right soon.
Not all Michael Moore’s points were good or well-sourced, but the perhaps his best point in “SiCKO” was where he points out that we have “socialized” many other aspects of our lives — i.e. made them public entities, paid for through taxation — like police protection, fire departments, libraries and parks. And such arrangements are viewed highly favorably. So why not healthcare?
Indeed.
I think the premise that a free-market system would not provide for the poorest, sickest members of society seems, on the surface, to be valid, but is actually rather flimsy. If you extended this logic to consumer goods, then one could argue that the only attractive segments for retailers would be high-end (i.e., high-margin) stores. And yet, the most successful retailer of all time built itself on serving middle & lower class families. I have to believe that if there is an under-served market out there, and there’s money to be made, someone will capture it. Perhaps the issue is not that for-profit hospitals would not serve these groups, rather it’s a consequence of the existence of public hospitals that they have the luxury to choose not to do so.
Brian–
WalMart can make money serving lower-income customers because it can import low-priced goods from China, mark them up, and still have an affordable product plus a nice profit.
But hospitals cannot import healthcare from China.
They could import lower-priced drugs and devices from Canada and Europe, but our government–which is run, to a fair degree, of by and for the lobbyists–won’t let them.
And even if they could import less expensive drugs and devices, much of healthcare is a labor-intensive business, which is one reason why it is so expensive.
This is an industry where you can’t “down-size” to become more efficient. For-profit hospitals have found that if they lower the ratio of nurses to patients, patients die.
So there is really no way to make a profit serving the poorest patients. It’s actually pretty hard for a hospital to make a profit serving well-insured patients.
For-profit hospitals purposefully build in areas where there are few uninsured and poor patients,yet even they have a hard time staying in the black–which is why they so often resort to cheating Medicare, cheating the patients, cheating insurers. (See the long history of for-profit hospital scandals from HCA to Tenet.)
This is why poor people and lower-middle-income people need government subsidies to help pay for their care.
“So there is really no way to make a profit serving the poorest patients. ”
Maggie, the same line of thinking applies to food or clothing or housing or any consumer product for that matter. So what?
No business focuses on a market that cannot afford its products. No business, that is, except Big Medicine. And Big Medicine demands that the public subsidize health care, either thru the government or from private employers, so they can be paid at the level that they want. What a system.
Of course, neither “government” nor “private employers” pay for anything. The only people who pay for anything, anywhere, at any time in history, are productive workers. In particular, governments can only transfer payments from the more productive to the less productive. That does not improve the overall economy.
Poor people and lower-middle-income people are poor and lower middle-income because they are less productive. Less productive people will always need help to meet the cost of the basic necessities of living because they produce less than they consume.
Wouldn’t it be preferable to help people become more productive, so that they can contribute more to the economy than they take out? Wouldn’t that benefit everyone? Wouldn’t that provide the poor and lower middle class a better chance to become productive and enter the middle-class? Where would one start with such an idea? Education, maybe?
Seems to me that is a more imaginative strategy than to continue to tax the more productive people to pay for the less-productive.
Michael Moore is only being negatively judged because he is showing Americans how much our government lies to us, how they don’t take care of us and how they are all about the money. Michael Moore may be a wierdo himself but at least that wierdo cared enough to spread the word. It’s a lot more than I can say about anyone else in the U.S. This country makes me ill. I am ashamed that I was born here. We Americans think we are so smart, we are some of the most ignorant people in this world. Get a clue. Change can’t be worst that current circumstances.
Selena says “government .. how they don’t take care of us.”
The government is not your
parent, your next door
neighbor is not your parent
it’s not the government’s
job or your neighbor to to take care of you your whole life, you need to take care of
YOURSELF. Try some responsiblity.
I’ve been coming to the conclusion that as a self-employed artist with several health issues needing attention that I can’t afford, I have a second job, and that is, by not being covered by a government plan of last resort, helping to keep rates and taxes down for everyone else. The trouble is, nobody is PAYING me for this job! If you want to make this a matter of personal responsibility, then there would be no artists except but the few who appeal to the lowest possible denominator, which typically means art (and you can include music in that) of the most mindless and uncreative sort.