By WILLIAM G. SESLER
Erie (Penn.) Times-News, April 3, 2011
While doing some research on health-care reform, I came across an interesting story.
In 2004, the Canadian Broadcasting Co. conducted polls for Canadians to nominate their choice for the man or woman whom they felt was the best Canadian in history. The person who won was Tommy Douglas.
I had heard of famous Canadians like Alexander Graham Bell, Wayne Gretzky and Dr. Frederick Banting (the inventor of insulin), but I had no idea who Tommy Douglas was.
It turns out that Douglas was the leader of the New Democratic Party, and he is considered the founder of the Canadian Healthcare System. He was (horrors!) a socialist and the seventh premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961. He led the first socialist government in North America and introduced public health care in Canada.
This tells me that Canadians must think a lot of their health-care system. America and Canada had similar health-care systems before Canada went to a single-payer system in the 1970s. Today, the United States spends much more money on health care than Canada, on both a per-capita basis and as a percentage of the GDP.
In 2006, per-capita spending on health care in Canada was U.S. $3,678; in the U.S. $6,714. The U.S. spent 15.3 percent on health care in that year; Canada spent 10 percent. Life expectancy is longer in Canada (80.34 years), compared to 78.6 years in the U.S. But to be fair, there is debate about the underlying causes of these differences.
An economic overview of America’s health-care system shows that about 42 million people are not covered at all. Many health-care plans place rigid limitations on which doctors and hospitals people can use; administrative costs are approaching 25 percent of the health-care dollar; managed care is generally structured so that some physicians have incentives to cut costs and gain revenue by withholding care; and many Americans live in fear of losing whatever care they have.
The current system is based on the power of the insurance industry to stifle any challenges from real alternatives.
In contrast, the single-payer system, which Canada has used for the last 25 years, has drastically simplified its administrative costs. One report indicates it takes more people to administer Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Massachusetts than it does to administer the entire health-care system in Canada.
Before Canada implemented its national health-care program, their health costs were the same portion of their economy as in the U.S. After they implemented their program, their costs stabilized at 9 percent, while U.S. costs have increased to 15.3 percent of our GDP.
Canada has a much higher percentage of general practitioners and fewer specialists. Canadian doctors make about one-third less than American doctors, and yet their satisfaction level is high because they have more time to practice medicine because paperwork is minimized.
Since there is single-payer there, it is easier to set up and adhere to budgetary limits. Effective planning eliminates duplication of facilities and expensive technology. In the U.S., competition has led to greater redundancies in expensive equipment such as CT scans; doctor groups and hospitals buy high-technology equipment and then compete for selling these services.
Both the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office said that if we were to implement a health-care system similar to the Canadian one, we could extend coverage to all Americans while saving billions of dollars annually.
Way back during the health-care debate in 1993, there were 89 co-sponsors of the single-payer system, and yet, it was not given serious consideration. The principal reason for this was the well-funded health-insurance industry with its effective lobbying forces in Congress.
Right now, Vermont is studying a Canadian-style, single-payer health system, a proposal of which was presented to the Vermont Legislature on Jan. 19. It will be very interesting to see what happens in that state.
WILLIAM G. SESLER, an Erie lawyer, is a former state senator.
http://www.goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110404/OPINION08/304049989/-1/opinion