Capitalist Solutions: A Philosophy of American Moral Dilemmas: 0 by Andrew Bernstein

Author:Andrew Bernstein [Bernstein, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 2011-12-30T14:00:00+00:00

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A Free Market Solution to Problems of Health Care

Introduction

The U.S. Government is taking the country far down the path leading inevitably to socialized medicine. Nor are these recent developments of the past two or three years; the nation has been on this road for many decades, going back as far as World War II. What are the problems of American medical care—what are their solutions—what are, emphatically, not proper solutions—and why? These questions are of literally life-and-death urgency.

Two important points: (1) The quality of American medical care is excellent. (2) The problem is its cost has become exorbitant, making it impossible for many persons to afford. Evidence for these claims?

First: by almost any rational measure, the quality of U.S. health care is the world’s finest. For example: Americans have a higher survival rate than any other country for thirteen of the sixteen most common cancers. Tens of thousands of international patients travel annually to the U.S. for medical care, including many from Canada’s system of socialized medicine—not in the reverse direction. Fewer than one in five American men with prostate cancer die from it—but 57 percent of English men and nearly half of French and German men do. If death by motor vehicle accident is subtracted, the American life expectancy is the world’s highest. By 2005, eighteen of the past twenty-five Nobel Prize winners for Medicine were either American citizens or chose to work here. Half of the major new medicines introduced worldwide were developed by American companies. American researchers played a key role in 80 percent of the most important medical advances of the prior thirty years. Dr. Maurice Hilleman and his team at Merck, for example, developed eight of the fourteen vaccines routinely recommended, including for mumps, measles, chicken pox, pandemic flu, hepatitis B, and others. Hilleman is credited with saving more lives than any other scientist of the twentieth century.

Given the poor diet of many Americans, and a widespread problem of obesity in the United States, the country’s high life expectancy is, in part, a tribute to the quality of its medical care.

Second: regarding rising cost, examples sadly abound. An extended hospital stay can be financially ruinous. The cost of a bed alone, independent of doctor fees, is over $1,000.00 per day, sometimes as much as $1,500.00. A simple Tylenol tablet often costs $20.00. Measured in constant dollars, annual medical spending in the United States exploded over the course of the twentieth century, rising from $155.00 per capita in 1919 to almost $4,000.00 in recent years. The U.S. Government figures report that physician services quadrupled in price between 1946 and century’s end—and continue to rise. Nobel Prize–winning economist, Milton Friedman, wrote that: “Expressed as a fraction of national income, spending on medical care went from 3 percent of the national income in 1919 to 4.5 percent in 1946, to 7 percent in 1965, to a mind-boggling 17 percent (highest in the world by far) in 1997”—and then continued to rise.

The result is that uninsured individuals live as much in dread of hospitalization’s cost as they do of serious illness itself.

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