Published: October 16, 2009 09:26 pm         

Flashpoint: It’s time to be informed on health care reform

I have always been known to be very opinionated … but also very well read and knowledgeable. I have over 25 years experience dealing with patients and health care systems, in these United States, as well as in several other countries. I had a full-time family medicine practice in Brazil and then, later, in Terre Haute. I also spent numerous hours working in emergency departments in several hospitals here in Indiana. I then went overseas to do long-term volunteer medical work.

To quote Ezekiel Emanuel, M.D., Ph.D., the author of an excellent book named “Healthcare Guaranteed — A Simple and Secure Solution for America:” “The American Healthcare system is a dysfunctional mess.” I could not agree more! We spend more than $7,000 per person every year on health care (more than twice as in second-place Switzerland and nearly double what Canada spends.) Despite these healthcare costs of over $2 trillion annually, we have a lower life expectancy than the Japanese, French, Germans and Canadians. Our infant mortality rate is twice as high as that of Japan, Sweden and Norway, even among whites.

And, everyone involved in our healthcare system is in some way at fault. Several for-profit hospital corporations and HMOs have been found guilty of fraud. Many pharmaceutical companies charge (and are paid) exorbitant profits … they prey on often-desperate patients eager for cures. The U.S. government often pays triple or more to a pharmaceutical company for medicine covered by Medicare Part D than it does for medicine used in the VA system. Why … because unethical congressman and senators accepted huge amounts of money from these companies to pass laws allowing this practice.

Between the years 2000 and 2007, I worked for between 6 months and 1 year, mostly as a volunteer, in South Dakota with the Indian Health Service, and then in Ethiopia, Swaziland (southern Africa), Haiti, Guatemala and Ecuador. My eyes were truly opened to the health care available in many other parts of the world. I also worked with other volunteer physicians and/or nurses from Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. I learned just how health care is given in the so-called “third world” and in other industrialized countries. I was often very embarrassed to try to explain the problems with our American health care system.

I would like now to share some facts and some personal observations:

1. The vast majority of physicians practicing in this country want a one-payer “insurance” system — and want it absolutely as quickly as possible. If this one payer is the U.S. government, then “all the better.”

2. The vast majority of the citizens in Canada, Great Britain, Germany, France, etc. love their health care delivery system. They are very happy to pay higher taxes in order to have free health care, free university education and good roads.

3. The opinions of many (or possibly most) Americans about pending health-care legislation are based on such things as a lack of knowledge, a lack of understanding, listening to misinformation, or even listening to blatant lies.

4. Many Americans say such things as, “Don’t let the government get involved in giving health care!” But, they are happy to accept Medicare, Medicaid, VA healthcare, or care given by the Indian Health Service. “Well, we earned that!” … yea, right!

5. Health insurance companies, in the majority of states, are virtual monopolies. They make criminally high profits by refusing health care to many and/or denying benefits because of “pre-existing conditions,” charging dreadfully high insurance premiums to companies and/or individuals.

6. These same insurance companies are now spending between $1.5 million and $2 million everyday in Washington to influence how our representatives and senators will vote. (That money would go a long way in helping pay for care that they themselves refuse to pay for.)

7. Absolutely nothing has been done in decades to counter this cancer called “frivolous law suits.”

8. Our present health care system is fraught with a greed motive; e.g. health insurance companies who refuse to pay charges yet charge high premiums; physicians (or other health care professionals) who charge much too much for certain procedures; physicians who do tests and/or procedures on a patient only to generate income, knowing that these are not needed; hospitals “encouraging” their physician staff to overuse/over order expensive lab tests. X-rays, CT scans, MRI exams, PET scans … just to generate income for the hospital; exorbitantly high charges for lab tests, hospital rooms, emergency room visits, radiology procedures, etc., again just to generate income.

There is often a tremendous difference between a true cost for something and the charges for that same thing.

9. Opposition to the so-called “public option” in proposed health care legislation is again based on ignorance and prejudice:

n This public option has nothing whatsoever to do with “socialized medicine.”

n The public option is a serious attempt to decrease health care costs to Americans by offering an alternative to the commercial insurance companies.

It is an affordable way to give insurance coverage to the 40-plus million Americans now unable to afford health care insurance.

Many of our representatives and senators in Washington are being bought off in order to influence how she or he will vote. Is that how democracy is supposed to work?

In closing I would like to compare many people I came to know and care about and for in Ethiopia (and other third-world countries) … and many people I know in these United States:

n Ethiopians: Friendly, quiet, appreciative, peaceful, full of joy and love and smiling despite their condition in life.

n Americans: Demanding, unappreciative, frequently angry and unfriendly.

Please become informed. Please become politically active. Please read the book I mentioned previously, or another very good book titled “Critical — What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis,” by former Sen. Tom Daschle. I personally feel that we need even much bigger changes than are being offered now in Washington, but at least there is an attempt being made to change things.



— Kennard B. Sproul, M.D.

Brazil