Two UW professors say U.S. could afford health care for all
Administrative bloat blamed for driving up costs
Jesse Hirsch- Portage Daily Register
Criticizing the large amount of “myth and knee-jerk reaction” surrounding universal health care, Chairperson Meghan Yost invited two prominent and vocal health care advocates to this week’s meeting of the Columbia County Towns Association.
Drs. Gene and Linda Farley, professors emeritus at the UW Madison Medical School, gave a rousing presentation Monday night about remedying ills in the U.S. health care system.
Gene Farley, former chairman of the school’s Department of Family Medicine, started by praising the potential of this country’s health care.
“We have some of the most fabulous resources in the world,” he said. “It’s unfortunate we also have one of the most clobbered health care systems.”
Farley’s wife then listed the two biggest things that need to be removed to get health care where it needs to be — huge overhead and the “for-profit corporatization of medicine.”
“(Doctors) feel like professionals but they try to turn us into businesses,” Gene Farley said.
The Farleys showed statistics about the huge increase in clerical and administrative workers needed to deal with complicated insurance programs, claims and billing.
For instance, they said a 900-bed hospital in Toronto, Canada, where health care is universal, has about three or four workers in the billing department. At a comparably sized hospital in Boston, they said, there are well over 300 billing employees.
The Farleys believe it is this bureaucratic waste, combined with corporate greed, which is largely responsible for the “grossly inflated” cost of health care in America.
They said that redirecting the vast amount of money spent on health care and pooling it together could create adequate resources to take care of every uninsured American.
Linda Farley cited statistics that the United States spends more tax dollars on health care, between Medicare, Medicaid and insurance for public employees and veterans, than most countries with a single payer health care system.
“U.S. public spending on health care is more than any other first-world country and it only covers 45 percent of the population,” she said.
The Farleys believe a universal health care system would actually save money and cut down on red tape, rather than the reverse. And they think the time for change is now.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 45 million Americans lacked health insurance in 2003, 1.4 million more than in 2002 and 5.2 million more than in 2000. In Wisconsin, the number of uninsured hovers around 500,000.
Working on a state-by-state basis is the first step, according to Gene Farley. He said the current administration is unlikely to make significant progress in overhauling our troubled system, so change will have to happen at the state level.
Farley said $7.72 billion was spent in Wisconsin in 2003 on health care administration, but that over $5 billion could have been saved with a single payer system.
“We’ve got to get out there and let our legislators know this matters to us,” he said.
After Monday’s meeting, Harlan Baumgartner, chairman of the Otsego Town Board, said he agreed with many points the Farleys made, but that change is “an uphill battle.”
“We seem to be very embedded in the way things are right now,” Baumgartner said. “The problem is how we get past people’s unwillingness to change.”
As far as biases against universal health care, Baumgartner feels this is an unnecessary complication to an already bloated problem.
“There’s a lot of prejudice in people’s minds,” he said. “To me, this is just a problem that needs to be solved.”