darth vader without the mask

Got an email from a quasi-friend today. He’s a Republican who is always trying to prove his side by quoting inane articles from Conservative Rags or parroting right-wing nut-jobs like Limbaugh. Today he sent me this.

This article reveals how Wisconsin has been turned into an “experiment” in single-payer health-care:

When Louis Brandeis praised the 50 states as “laboratories of democracy,” he didn’t claim that every policy experiment would work. So we hope the eyes of America will turn to Wisconsin, and the effort by Madison Democrats to make that “progressive” state a petri dish for government-run health care.

This exercise is especially instructive, because it reveals where the “single-payer,” universal coverage folks end up. Democrats who run the Wisconsin Senate have dropped the Washington pretense of incremental health-care reform and moved directly to passing a plan to insure every resident under the age of 65 in the state. And, wow, is “free” health care expensive. The plan would cost an estimated $15.2 billion, or $3 billion more than the state currently collects in all income, sales and corporate income taxes. It represents an average of $510 a month in higher taxes for every Wisconsin worker.

Yeah, that’s right, keep banging those old “Socialist Health-Care Plans Baaaaaad” drums. Sounds like the big money paper is a-scared of the impact that “Sicko” is going to have on the masses. Fortunately for us, the forward thinking masses, Jane Bryant Quinn has a piece in Newsweek which sets the record straight.

Universal coverage costs too much. No—what costs too much is the system we have now. In 2005, the United States spent 15.3 percent of gross domestic product on health care for only some of us. France spent 10.7 percent and covered everyone. The French comparison is good because its system works very much like Medicare-for-all. The other European countries, all with universal coverage, spent less than France.

Why are U.S. costs off the charts? Partly because we don’t bargain with providers for a universal price. Partly because of the money that health insurers spend on marketing and screening people in or out. Medicare’s overhead is just 1.5 percent, compared with 13 to 16 percent in the private sector. John Sheils of the Lewin Group, a health-care consultant, says that the health insurers’ overhead came to $120 billion last year, of which $40 billion was profit. By comparison, it would cost $54 billion to cover all the uninsured.

The truth of the matter is, what we have now is too expensive and doesn’t work. Our health-care system is broken. Too many people are sick and dying for want of health-care coverage. We are the wealthiest nation in the world. Like Mikey says, if we can afford billions to kill people (Iraq war), we can afford billions to help people.