The President of the United Auto Workers union supports single-payer, and makes a case for health care reform: how can American car manufacturers compete with other countries when GM has a $61 billion health care liability, and Toyota doesn’t?
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Often those that oppose national health care schemes like to claim that innovation and research suffer under the budgetting schemes of countries like Canada and the UK, but this year’s Lasker Medical Awards, “widely considered the United States’ most prestigious medical prizes,” went to two British and two Canadian researchers:
The research award for stem cell work is going to Drs. Ernest A. McCulloch and James E. Till, emeritus professors at the University of Toronto and the Ontario Cancer Institute.
…
Sir Edwin Southern of the University of Oxford and Sir Alec J. Jeffreys of the University of Leicester in England received the Lasker Award for developing two powerful technologies, Southern blotting and DNA fingerprinting, that, the foundation said, “together revolutionized human genetics and forensic diagnostics.”
The initial CT and MRI scanner creation also partially came out of Britain as well.
(thanks quote of the day!)
That’s right, folks. Starbucks now spends more on health insurance for its workers than it does for the primary product it sells: coffee. We’re in trouble, folks:
Howard Schultz, chairman of Starbucks, announces his plans to spend more on health insurance for its employees this year than on raw materials needed to brew its coffee.
According to Schultz, the Seattle-based company has had double-digit increases in insurance costs for the last four years.
Schultz made the announcement at a Washington, D.C. meeting with lawmakers from his home state – one of several organized by Schultz to address “a growing health care crisis.”
Shultz said he hopes congressional leaders will put the issue “at the front of their agenda.”
It’s similar to the American car manufacturers; they spend more on health insurance than on the steel to build their cars.
Something’s got to change, but mark my words–if it hasn’t changed by the time the avian flu hits (if the epidemiology predictions are right), it’ll definitely change after.
With the exception of celebrities and politicians (our royalty?) you don’t really get preferential treatment based on your ability to pay. (in the US)
If MedPundit really thinks that insurance doesn’t get you any preferential treatment in the US, she’s totally jumped the shark. Newsflash: Getting treatment at all is preferential treatment, Dr. Smith.
And more to the point of her post: people die on waiting lists all the time in the US, too. And Canadians requiring emergency care get it.
From Dr. Quentin Young in today’s Trib, comes a nice editorial for single-payer. Not only has General Motors moved much of its production to Canada, even Lifesavers moved their Michigan plant to Canada for lower costs:
On April 19, General Motors Corp. blamed its dismal first-quarter results (a $1.1 billion loss) on its $5.6 billion annual health-care tab. On top of that, the company carries $63 billion in unfunded health-benefit costs. The future certainly looks bleak.
Clearly a disaster is looming not only for GM and its workforce, but also for the entire American economy. America’s other largest corporations also face skyrocketing health-care costs; General Electric Co., Boeing Co., Lucent Technologies Inc., IBM Corp., Verizon Communications Inc., SBC Communications Inc. and Ford Motor Co. have a combined $150 billion in future health-benefit obligations. Their future looks bleak too.
Ominously, non-competitive American products are sending our jobs abroad.
From candy to autos, Canadians can produce goods more cheaply because of their markedly lower health-benefits costs. For example, in Canada a Ford costs $1,400 less to make than it does to produce in Michigan. Lifesavers shaved $4 per hour off its labor costs by boarding up its hometown factory in Holland, Mich., and heading for Canada.
Alert pundits are, at long last, calling U.S. business to account.
They are pointing out what has been obvious to all industrialized democratic nations around the world for some time now: Employer-based health-care benefits are a bottomless pit. Seventeen American steel manufacturers have declared bankruptcy and terminated their retirees’ health benefits.
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Why isn’t “Health Care for All” sexy?
We’ve got hundreds of thousands of people wearing those Lance Armstrong armbands, and tens of thousands I’m sure wearing those knock-offs, and I started wondering, “Why isn’t there one for the uninsured?”
If people can get behind supporting cancer victims, or donating money to Jerry’s kids, or walking for breast cancer, or basket-weaving to fight Prader-Willi’s, why not the uninsured? And where’s the celebrity spokesman? I started to think that it must just be that celebrities have insurance, and therefore don’t have any experience with being uninsured, but that’s completely untrue; almost all of them started out uninsured trying to make it big in LA or New York, I bet. Have they forgotten so quickly?
If people can so easily get behind some awful disease with no cure in sight (HIV, any number of rare genetic disorders, most cancers), why isn’t there more support for something that most other industrialized countries *have* been able to cure? (I’m using ‘cure’ liberally here, don’t get in a commenting tizzy.)
Is it that people think the uninsured don’t deserve insurance, or that it’s their fault they don’t have it? (There’s plenty of people that way about HIV, but it’s still supported.)
Or is it maybe that it’s easier to support something that we don’t entirely understand and know how to fix? That it’s something still beyond our grasp, beyond our means, that is dropped on unlucky individuals? There’s plenty of diseases out there that *are* 100% preventable; why aren’t we knocking those down quickly? (I’m thinking lead poisoning as an example.)
Maybe it’s that those diseases primarily affect the disenfranchised, impoverished, and the minorities? You don’t see a whole lot of funding out there for sarcoidosis, primarily affecting black people, or liver cancer, which is huge in Asia because of hepatitis.
So line right up celebrities and PR firms. Let’s make pre-existing conditions and 18,000 deaths a year the sexiest thing since testicular cancer.
On a side note: studying for the boards brings an insanely huge number of interesting ideas into one’s mind. My head is like an 8 year-old desperately trying to stall from having to go to bed. Boards studying is right up there with showering as far as number and quality of ideas go. I’m starting to think the great inventors and thinkers of all-time either a) took a lot of showers or b) studied for Step One for their entire lives.
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Wha? Vermont may pass single-payer? Studying so much I almost missed it. A lot of the credit goes to Dr. Deb Richter, a tireless crusader for the cause. [Via Cut to Cure, who doesn’t sound as excited as me, but at least he’s open-minded.]
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Look for me or my classmates asking Governor Schwarzenegger the tough questions tomorrow on Hardball with Chris Matthews, on MSNBC. I’ll obviously be asking about plot inconsistencies in Terminator 2 health care reform in California.
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“We cannot solve the problems that face Medicare without dealing with the broader problems that face health care in America,” said Robert Reischauer, president of the nonpartisan Urban Institute — a Washington think tank — and former director of the Congressional Budget Office.
…Reischauer at the Urban Institute “>said single-payer may ultimately hold the answers not just for Medicare but also covering the 45 million Americans now lacking health insurance.
“If push came to shove, I would want a single-payer system instead of the system we have now,” he said. “But the political obstacles to that are considerable.”