I’ve enjoyed single-payer universal healthcare coverage since I was granted permanent residency in Australia in 1997. If I visit a ‘bulk-billing’ GP or an emergency room, I plunk down my Medicare card and it’s all done & dusted.<\/p>\n
The last time I used healthcare services in the USA, they demanded either health insurance information, a cash bond or a credit card before they even wanted to hear why I was seeking treatment<\/em>. That’s reprehensible. Healthcare should be a right, not a privilege affordable only by the wealthy.<\/p>\n Everyone uses electricity and roads and everybody uses healthcare services. We don’t build a separate power grid for every electricity subscriber nor a private road for every road user- why have a private insurer or healthcare provider for every healthcare user?<\/p>\n Yes, you can get private health insurance or be treated in a private hospital in Australia… but why? A parallel private healthcare system simply undermines the public system by diverting participants out of it. The short answer as to why private healthcare even exists in Australia is that right-wing, pro-business politicians and their health industry supporters have wanted to undermine Australia’s public system since its inception- because it doesn’t generate profit for the private healthcare providers and insurers.<\/p>\n Capitalism may work in certain business arenas but it’s got no place in the provision of essential community services which are necessarily used by all citizens.<\/p>\n The completely off-the-rails opposition to single-payer universal healthcare in the USA clearly indicates the threat level to the profitability of private healthcare insurers and providers. Providers and insurers will fight to protect their profits with a million times the effort they’ll put in to providing competent healthcare. This opposition has now devolved into truly batshit-crazy rumourmongering PR campaigns, including ‘astroturfing,’ the formation of industry-funded fake grassroots groups which push the industry’s agenda. Australian readers should know that most Americans’ healthcare is paid for by their employers as part of their compensation package. If you lose your job, you lose your health insurance. In such a case, under the provisions of the COBRA<\/a> statute, the former employee can purchase health insurance at hugely inflated rates for a limited period of time post their separation from the employer. Also, unlike in Australia, where private health insurance companies are required to base premiums on ‘community risk’ rather than individual risk, one’s health insurance can be cancelled for the causes of ‘pre-existing conditions’ or for simply lodging claims against one’s coverage.<\/p>\n If there’s any ‘death panels’ in US healthcare, they already exist<\/em> in private health insurance companies, which frequently deny coverage to unprofitable individual clients, negating the entire reason for the business model of insurance, that being the spreading of the high cost of a few participants across the entire body of insured persons, most of whom make few or no claims. Insurance companies clearly want to have their cake and to eat it, too. Insurers obviously only want to cover people who make no claims, because income without outgo equals pure profit. The only way to stop profiteering is to legislate against the practise.<\/p>\n
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\nTruly, the wackiest claim of all the right-wing anti-universal healthcare loopiness is that healthcare services will be somehow limited to people ‘worth saving.’ They want people to believe that Obama’s universal care reforms will kill your grandma. <\/em>This nuttery was morphed from a provision which pays GPs to consult with aged patients regarding their treatment desires in a ‘living will’ into the ‘death panel<\/a>‘ myth by a healthcare industry shill by the name of Betsy McCaughey, who resigned from her position with a healthcare industry company<\/a> a day before her appearance on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show<\/em>, to (unsuccesfully) avoid claims of conflict of interest. McCaughey was fully demolished and her lies laid bare<\/a> by Stewart. (NB: For non-US browsers to view full episodes of The Daily Show<\/em> on Comedy Central’s website, users must install the X-Forwarded-for IP spoofer plugin<\/a> to their Firefox browser and input a US-based IP address.)<\/p>\n