Wendell Potter can remember exactly when he took the first steps on his journey to becoming a whistleblower and turning against one of the most powerful industries in America.
It was July 2007 and Potter, a senior executive at giant US healthcare firm Cigna, was visiting relatives in the poverty-ridden mountain districts of northeast Tennessee. He saw an advert in a local paper for a touring free medical clinic at a fairground just across the state border in Wise County, Virginia.
Potter, who had worked at Cigna for 15 years, decided to check it out. What he saw appalled him. Hundreds of desperate people, most without any medical insurance, descended on the clinic from out of the hills. People queued in long lines to have the most basic medical procedures carried out free of charge. Some had driven more than 200 miles from Georgia. Many were treated in the open air. Potter took pictures of patients lying on trolleys on rain-soaked pavements.
For Potter it was a dreadful realisation that healthcare in America had failed millions of poor, sick people and that he, and the industry he worked for, did not care about the human cost of their relentless search for profits. “It was over-powering. It was just more than I could possibly have imagined could be happening in America,” he told the Observer
Potter resigned shortly afterwards. Last month he testified in Congress, becoming one of the few industry executives to admit that what its critics say is true: healthcare insurance firms push up costs, buy politicians and refuse to pay out when many patients actually get sick. In chilling words he told a Senate committee: “I worked as a senior executive at health insurance companies and I saw how they confuse their customers and dump the sick: all so they can satisfy their Wall Street investors.”
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This is the system that Canadian Shona Holmes — current ObamaCare poster girl of the GoP — supports but wants Canada to pay for.
I’m all for personal responsibility for healthcare insurance if you can actually afford it, and if the insurance companies are willing to play fair, but as many can testify that just ain’t the case is it?
Bang on Stageleft. Just look at who the big anti universal health care people are in the states and you will find your answer.
As the old saying goes ‘follow the money.’
OK UV lets follow the money, even though I can all but guarantee that most of the money and expensive mistakes that have led to the current problems will point right back at the US government, either through its corrupt and broken system of allowing bribes from lobbyists (which the now majority Democrats continue to expend way too much energy on trying to keep out of this very debate for obvious reasons), or through bloated bureaucratic waste in the public aspect of the US health care system.
OECD Factbook: Public and private expenditure on health
http://tinyurl.com/netllp
From this graph we can see that US taxpayers are already paying for what are essentially two overly expensive systems of healthcare, one public and one private. Even though the US already spends more per capita on its public healthcare system than either the OECD average or we Canadians do, those expenditures currently provide coverage to only one third of American citizens, making it the least efficient public system in the developed world. The Democrat appointed Congressional budget office (CBO) has estimated that these already bloated and rising out of control public expenditures on healthcare would have to be increased by somewhere between 50% and 100% before the public system could accommodate those Americans who currently have no coverage, so under what is shaping up to be the Obama plan, for almost double the money that we Canadians pay, the US public system will still only provide coverage to less than half of US citizens.
If it is still any wonder why many US taxpayers are loath to pour ever more money into such a bloated and wasteful big government public system, consider that if they value their own health and well being, those same US taxpayers are also going to have to continue purchasing expensive private healthcare for themselves, because the public healthcare system would still not be able to accommodate them irregardless of the fact that it will also continue to provide crappy service in comparison to the private system that many Americans have become accustomed to.
While the public system is overly expensive due to the bloated bureaucracy and government intervention associated with all such systems, the private system is overly expensive for reasons that have little to do with itself (keep in mind that the private system pays for itself as it covers many more people than the public system does for less money, while it also creates wealth and employs many thousands of workers through exporting its many innovative products to the wider world, including Canada), since many of its problems are due to a long history of government tampering for political reasons, and negligence in dealing with a broken lobbying system that gives lawyers more say in healthcare systems than doctors have. The US jackpot litigation system is probably the main reason why private insurance is overly expensive, and the other is that hospitals, constrained by their own budget limitations and those of government inspired bean counters (users of the overrated HMO model have received way too many tax incentives especially during the Clinton administration), systemically overcharge those who have private health insurance in order to help defray the costs associated with providing services to those who only have public insurance or none at all.
Fixing the current systems so that coverage could be extended to all who need and should have it, would require that several interrelated and serious but hardly insurmountable problems be resolved. Unfortunately the far left doesn’t think that way, and continues to push for major reform because it has only one answer to everything, which is of course to exert big government control over everything, allowing socialists to direct resources where they benefit politically, while rationing healthcare, capping doctor’s salaries, and outlawing profits, which would cost tens of thousands of blue and white collar workers their jobs as well as put an end to three quarters of all new medical advances that are currently being made in the world. Therefore, while US healthcare systems do face serious problems that need to be addressed, if the Democrats pass Obamacare, chances are very good that many of the current problems will persist just as new ones are being created.