Healthcare Reason, Not Hysteria

So much of what has been passing for a debate about health care reform has been out and out hysteria (death panels, anyone?) that it was a pleasant suprise to find a reasonable discussion about the topic.

Tom Luce wrote a great article on http://www.crosscut.com/ about Health Care Reform: below are some excerpts. Read the whole thing at: http://crosscut.com/2009/08/20/health-medicine/19170/

"I have lived most of my life in Britain. I have used the British Health Service on and off for over 60 years and the US health care system here in Seattle equally for the last 15. In my main career I worked as a senior Civil Servant in the British Health Department where for a while I was the Under Secretary responsible for negotiating the health care budget with the Treasury. I have used “socialised medicine.” I have observed it at close quarters. And I have helped to run it.
It’s no boast but a statement of fact to say that I can recognize it when I see it and know what’s good and what’s bad about it. I am equally confident that none of the proposals now before the US public amount in any serious sense to “socialized medicine,” and that an informed and rational debate around these proposals should lead to real improvement in the way health care in the US is paid for. "

...

"There is no question of moving to a government-run system for the generality of U.S. health care. None of the proposals emanating from the House or the Senate would lead to a single monolithic health care service or increase the federal government’s role in the direct provision and management of health care. There is good reason for this. The U.S. consumer’s expectation of promptness and choice of access and the American voters' traditional dislike of government combine with extremely powerful and well entrenched health care and insurance provider interests to mean that any efforts to recreate a British-style health care system in the US would be politically insane. Whatever its virtues and defects in its own context, the British system is not a viable export. "

...

"In the US we tend to think that the health care system is based on the private sector. So it is, on the delivery side. But on the financing side, federal and state governments are already massive players. In only a few years, without any of the present reforms being adopted, one dollar in every five spent in the U.S. will go for health care, and nearly 50 cents in each of those dollars will be channeled through government. Given the size of the U.S. population, and its very high spending on health care, the federal government must already be the largest source of money for health care in the world. If channeling money for health through government agencies is “socialized medicine,” then the USA is already, and irrevocably, its global capital. "