| Healthcare in the U.S. is already rationed. |
| [A]s long as your health insurance depends on your job, your health is only insured insofar as your job is insured - and your job isn't insured.
Because all of us could lose our jobs. The combination of job loss and serious illness could wipe out almost anyone (under the age of 65 - actually, anyone over 65 as well, since Medicare doesn't cover extended nursing home care), and we all suffer serious economic insecurity because of it. Source: "You Do Not Have Health Insurance" - by: James Kwak - truthout.org - 05 August 2009 Researchers from Harvard and Ohio State recently conducted a national, random-sample survey of more than 2,300 families who filed for bankruptcy in 2007. As they report in the American Journal of Medicine, 60 percent of those families were forced into bankruptcy by high health-care bills. The situation is likely much worse today, since this survey was taken before the current spike in job losses. Here's an even more sobering finding: the great majority of those bankrupted were not uninsured poor folks, but middle-class, well-educated people -- 75 percent of whom had health insurance! Source: "A BANKRUPT SYSTEM THAT BANKRUPTS FAMILIES" by Jim Hightower - August 26, 2009 If you’re worried about rationed care, higher costs, denied coverage, or bureaucrats getting between you and your doctor, then you should know that’s what’s happening right now. In the past three years, over 12 million Americans were discriminated against by insurance companies due to a preexisting condition, or saw their coverage denied or dropped just when they got sick and needed it most. Americans whose jobs and health care are secure today just don’t know if they’ll be next to join the 14,000 who lose their health insurance every single day. And if we don’t act, average family premiums will keep rising to more than $22,000 within a decade. Source: "Remarks of President Barack Obama" - Weekly Address - Saturday, August 15th, 2009 According to a report released by the Institute on Medicine, the average cost of family health care coverage more than doubled from 1999 to 2008, from $1,543 to $3,354. Source: "Is Health Care Reform on Life Support?" by: Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III, truthout.org - 13 August 2009 A study reported in The American Journal of Medicine this month found that 62 percent of American bankruptcies are linked to medical bills. These medical bankruptcies had increased nearly 50 percent in just six years. Astonishingly, 78 percent of these people actually had health insurance, but the gaps and inadequacies left them unprotected when they were hit by devastating bills. A 2004 study by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, found that lack of health insurance causes 18,000 unnecessary deaths a year. That’s one person slipping through the cracks and dying every half an hour. In short, it’s a good bet that our existing dysfunctional health system knocks off far more people than an army of "death panels" could -- even if they existed, worked 24/7 and got around in a fleet of black helicopters. Source: "Until Medical Bills Do Us Part" By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF - NY Times - August 29, 2009 Pharmaceutical manufacturers often charge much more for drugs in the United States than they charge for the same drugs in Britain, where they know that a higher price would put the drug outside the cost-effectiveness limits set by NICE. American patients, even if they are covered by Medicare or Medicaid, often cannot afford the copayments for drugs. That’s rationing too, by ability to pay. Dr. Art Kellermann, associate dean for public policy at Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta, recently wrote of a woman who came into his emergency room in critical condition because a blood vessel had burst in her brain. She was uninsured and had chosen to buy food for her children instead of spending money on her blood-pressure medicine. In the emergency room, she received excellent high-tech medical care, but by the time she got there, it was too late to save her. A New York Times report on the high costs of some drugs illustrates the problem. Chuck Stauffer, an Oregon farmer, found that his prescription-drug insurance left him to pay $5,500 for his first 42 days of Temodar, a drug used to treat brain tumors, and $1,700 a month after that. For Medicare patients drug costs can be even higher, because Medicare can require a copayment of 25 percent of the cost of the drug. For Gleevec, a drug that is effective against some forms of leukemia and some gastrointestinal tumors, that one-quarter of the cost can run to $40,000 a year. Hospitals are prohibited from turning away anyone who will be endangered by being refused treatment. But even in emergency rooms, people without health insurance may receive less health care than those with insurance. Joseph Doyle, a professor of economics at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T., studied the records of people in Wisconsin who were injured in severe automobile accidents and had no choice but to go to the hospital. He estimated that those who had no health insurance received 20 percent less care and had a death rate 37 percent higher than those with health insurance. This difference held up even when those without health insurance were compared with those without automobile insurance, and with those on Medicaid — groups with whom they share some characteristics that might affect treatment. The lack of insurance seems to be what caused the greater number of deaths. A recent Commonwealth Fund study led by Cathy Schoen and Robin Osborn surveyed adults with chronic illness ... More than half (54 percent) [of Americans] reported not filling a prescription, not visiting a doctor when sick or not getting recommended care. In comparison, in the United Kingdom the figure was 13 percent, and in the Netherlands, only 7 percent. Even among Americans with insurance, 43 percent reported that cost was a problem that had limited the treatment they received. Source: "Why We Must Ration Health Care" By PETER SINGER - NY Times Magazine - July 15, 2009 The unvarnished truth is that services are ultimately going to have to be curtailed regardless of what happens with reform. We perform more expensive tests, questionable surgeries and high-tech diagnostic scans than we can afford. We spend unsustainable amounts of money on patients during the final year of life. Yes, it’s true that doctors order some questionable procedures defensively, to keep from getting sued. But it’s a cop-out to blame the doctors or the tort lawyers. We’re the ones who demand these tests, scans and surgeries. And why not? If a technology exists that can prolong life or improve its quality, even for a few weeks or months, why shouldn’t we want it? That’s the reason people are so frightened and enraged about the proposed measure that would allow Medicare to pay for end-of-life counseling. If the government says it has to control health care costs and then offers to pay doctors to give advice about hospice care, citizens are not delusional to conclude that the goal is to reduce end-of-life spending. Source: "A Reason for All the Health Care Rage" By Eugene Robinson - Truthdig.com - Aug 11, 2009 The allocation of any limited resource inherently implies rationing. The question isn't "Do we ration healthcare?" By definition, we already do, and we will continue to under any program. The right question is "How do we expend our healthcare resources most efficiently?" |
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