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The tired term "socialized medicine" was coined in the late 1940s by an American Medical Association public-relations representative who was trying to submarine Harry Truman’s attempt to enact universal healthcare.
Despite a shelf life of more than 60 years, this slogan is no more accurate than "death panels."But in the current healthcare reform debate, precision of language and civility seem beside the point."Government takeover of healthcare" is no less vague. Polls show that those over 65 oppose greater government involvement in healthcare delivery the most, yet these Medicare recipients are more satisfied about their government-run healthcare than those who are covered by private insurance.They have the much-maligned Canadian single-payer system, love it and don’t want anyone else to have it.Effective healthcare reform has two paramount goals: significantly broadening access and controlling costs. Our current system performs poorly on both fronts.Free-market principles work well in many sectors of the U.S. economy, but they fail us in healthcare because demand is supplier-induced and policy makers refuse to arm consumers with the information they need to impose market discipline.The alternative is heavy-handed government regulation — used by our industrialized-nation peers and loathed by most Americans. Phobia toward government involvement in healthcare is irrational. No one seems to question the need for government-supplied schools or government-run police forces. The U.S. is the only industrialized nation that does not consider healthcare a basic human right. The federal government deserves scorn on many fronts, but it does a superior job in the healthcare arena.The Veterans Administration is well ahead of the private sector on coordination of care, cost efficiency, use of electronic medical records and preventive care. Even the Indian Health Service spends only a third of the national average on per-capita care despite American Indians having the worst health outcomes of any U.S. ethnic group.Washington Post correspondent T.R. Reid recently published The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care. He used a chronic shoulder injury as an excuse to travel the world to see how it would be treated under a variety of healthcare systems. Some of the nations he visited: France, Britain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Japan and Canada. These nations spend far less per capita and devote a fraction of their gross domestic product compared with the U.S., yet they cover virtually everyone and perform better on quality measures.There is no "right way" of doing this. In Britain, 40 percent of the physicians are employed by the government while the remaining 60 percent bill the government. In Canada, Taiwan and Australia, the government pays the bills but the physicians and hospitals are private — a setup that mirrors U.S. Medicare.In Japan, the Netherlands, Switzerland and France, the physicians, hospitals and insurance companies are private.
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