This blog printed on 100% recycled electrons.
Says Dr. Ronald Ackerman, one of the contributors to the research:
"Across the board, more physicians feel that our fragmented and for-profit insurance system is obstructing good patient care, and a majority now support national insurance as the remedy" [see Maggie Fox, Reuters, "Doctors Support Universal Health Care: Survey," Yahoo News, 2008.03.31].
See, Dennis Kucinich isn't that far out of the mainstream after all.
You can find the full survey here, though, like the LAIC, they charge you to get a copy. For those of you with access to a nice academic library, here's the full citation:
Carroll, A.E., and Ackerman, R.T. "Support for National Health Insurance Among U.S. Physicians: 5 Years Later," Annals of Internal Medicine, 2008, 148: 566-567.
I have mixed feelings about "socialized medicine."
ReplyDeleteOn the surface, it sounds good. When a person is weak and sick, the last thing they need is to worry about whether their frailty will be taken advantage of, and whether or not they will have to hire an attorney to get their insurance company to honor their contract.
Imagine -- you lie burning up with fever in hospital, so delirious you cannot figure out which lawyer to call. I have been there ...
The other side of the issue, to me, is how such a program would be funded. I would suggest making the current income tax more progressive, but only for those earning more than a million dollars a year, and then it should be indexed for inflation.
The one thing I dread the most is the prospect of our getting stuck with a value-added tax (VAT), which countries such as France use to fund their national health care systems. This is a vicious, malignant, stealthy, regressive tax. It strikes hardest at the poor, the elderly, the weak and the sick, precisely those folks that national health care would supposedly benefit. Moreover, small businesses that cannot pass on the VAT to their customers or clients are forced to absorb it, so it becomes an income-tax surcharge, striking from both ends at rates up to 20 percent in some countries. Even Nancy Pelosi, I believe, recognizes that.
From what I can see, Barack Obama would have the most reasonable approach to all of this, at present. But only if he keeps the VAT out of his bag.
As for Hillary Clinton, what she says may be brutally true, but I can't resist thinking of her as "Madame Mandate." I would not dream of going without health care any more than I would dream of going without peanut butter. But I have no wish to be forced to take either.
That is why, despite all of the above, I remain a Republican. A Revised Republican.
Stan Gibilisco
Lead
www.sciencewriter.net
Hi, Stan!
ReplyDelete(Not ignoring you, by the way, just gone all weekend!)
How to pay for it? That's easy: take all the money you're already spending on private insurance premiums and just shift it to a national health program. In private insurance, 15-25% of your money pays for executive salaries, yachts, and other overhead that doesn't do one thing to cure disease or heal injury. Go national non-profit, and overhead drops to 2-3%. More of your health care dollar goes to actual health care. Heck of a deal.