Taking care of our own: Health care in Spain has Lessons for the U.S.
By Pius Kamau
The Denver Post
9/5/07
We watched the running of the bulls in Pamplona from the safety of a balcony off a physician’s office. A crashing crowd of thousands and half a dozen bulls ran down the narrow street below us.
Then we saw a bull make an about-turn and attack several people, among them Lawrence and Michael Lenahan, brothers from Philadelphia. One suffered a deep wound to his buttocks; the other a less serious leg wound. Both required hospitalization.
I visited the ultra-modern University Hospital where the Lenahans were taken, a facility where heart and kidney transplants are routinely performed. I believe their care was as good as that offered in many American trauma centers.
Considering the current debate about health care reform in the U.S., I wondered what the Lenahans’ care would cost in Spain. All Spaniards’ health care is covered by Seguro Social, the state’s medical insurance, I learned. Hospital physicians told me that emergency care for all patients — regardless of citizenship — is provided without charge.
“Why would they do so?,” I asked. “Es lo justo,” I was told. It’s the right thing to do.
Until Francisco Franco’s death in 1975, fascist Spain was “the sick man” of Europe. After democracy and capitalism took root, the country’s economic fortunes reversed. Like other European countries, Spain has universal health care. Part of its success results from the fact that employers, industry and businesses are not shackled to their employees’ health care.
Most Spaniards I talked to are very happy that everyone is saved from being uninsured. They also were quick to point out that there is also private medical insurance for those who want it or can afford it. They consider our health care system a travesty and can’t understand why we can’t devise a system that works for all.
In Spain, France and the United Kingdom, illness condemns no one to penury. Every child is guaranteed immunization and basic health care. Every citizen in the European Union has the one thing 47 million Americans lack: universal health insurance. Contrary to what one hears, I found medical care in Europe to be as good as in the U.S.
In his book, “The United States of Europe,” T.R. Reid — a Colorado resident and former London bureau chief of The Washington Post — shows that health care in Europe is economically and socially a much better system than our own. Unburdened by a top-heavy health care system, Europe, he says, is bound to overtake the U.S. economically.
Americans don’t know that we can quite economically cover everyone without raising taxes or jeopardizing the quality of care. Furthermore, we can copy those parts of the Canadian and European systems that best suit us, to attain universal coverage.
What we need is a Medicare-like health care for all Americans, something similar to the federal system used by our senators and congressmen, a system divorced of the profit-seeking middlemen.
What’s abhorrent is the travesty of Americans losing their savings and livelihoods from illness because they are uninsured, of children dying from easily preventable conditions. The number of the uninsured in America has risen to 47 million as we argue about semantics, and our people are dying unnecessarily. Surely we can take care of our own citizens.
Pius Kamau of Aurora is a thoracic and general surgeon. He was born and raised in Kenya and immigrated to the U.S. in 1971.