With healthcare reform being one of the top issues of the 2008 presidential campaign, it is critical that voters arm themselves with the information to establish fact from fiction. One of the myths central to pro-universal-healthcare activists touts that 50 million Americans are uninsured. This number seems relatively accurate at first glance with the U.S. Census Bureau reporting 47 million uninsured Americans nationwide. After taking a closer look, however, nearly 10 million of the 47 million counted as uninsured are not legal American citizens. Whether illegal immigrants should be eligible for coverage is a different question altogether, so for argument's sake, we'll presume that they don't. The 47 million also fails to take full account of the several million poor who are eligible for government Medicaid, but have not yet applied. It is widely considered that these are healthier people on average who could always apply if they were in need of significant care. Also keep in mind that it is illegal in the United States to refuse urgent care. The Census Bureau also reports 18 million uninsured who earn in excess of $50,000 per household annually. It is rational to say that these are relatively healthy people who have no desire to spend on health care, but it is important to recognize that these people still have access to medical care should they need it. Perhaps the most alarming statistic regarding uninsured Americans is that of the 47 million uninsured, around one in every four have been offered employer-provided insurance, but declined coverage for unknown and probably varying reasons. When these numbers are taken out of the reported 47 million, somewhere in the range of 3 to 7 million Americans remain uninsured ' a vast minority of the population. Private healthcare does have its problems, but it is hard to argue that it is failing on the whole. With Canada being the main country of comparison for many healthcare arguments, it will be the main focus of comparison for this piece. A widespread myth about healthcare is that Canada's universal coverage system is superior to the U.S.'s private system in terms of quality of care received. This is a vital dynamic of the healthcare system and claims against quality of care should not be taken lightly. A patient of Canadian healthcare waits 17.7 weeks, on average, for hospital treatment with residents of Saskatchewan waiting an average of 30 weeks. These waiting times are unheard of in America's private system. In the United States, the occasional story of a death occurring while waiting for an operation, while unfortunate and heart-wrenching, is nothing short of ordinary in countries with socialized medicine. In 1999, Dr. Richard F. Davies, a cardiologist at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, described to the Canadian Institute for Health Information how delays affected Ontario heart patients scheduled for coronary artery bypass graft surgery. In a single year, for this one operation, the doctor reported, 71 Ontario patients died before surgery
121 were removed from the list permanently because they had become medically unfit for surgery and 44 left the province to have the surgery many having gone to the United States for the operation. In short, 192 people either died or became too sick to have surgery before even getting a chance to be operated on. Michael Moore's Sicko made no mention of this. From a technology stance, the U.S. is head and shoulders above Canada. In 1997, Canada averaged only 1.8 MRI units per million people compared to 7.6 per million in America, with only two units in the entire city of Montreal, a city of about two million at the time. Access to technology considered essential in America is by and large a scarce commodity in countries with social medicine that is one of the main reasons the provinces of Quebec and Alberta have opted for a private system. This is much to the dismay of the Canadian government, which is threatening to withhold medical funding to these provinces until all private practices are closed. Universal healthcare systems have the benefit of no barriers to entry, but are the dearth of quality and unavailability of technology worth the cost? There is no such thing as free healthcare with the substantial tax hike that occurs in countries that opt for a universal coverage system. I urge everyone to understand the give and take that is involved with switching healthcare systems and the idea not neither of the two systems are perfect, or ever will be.
Todd Holbrook is a junior economics major.
17
Archives
Letter to the Editor
