OUR COUNTDOWN TO FASCIST MEDICINE

Commentary
By Arthur Caplan, Ph.D
msnbc.com contributor
updated 59 minutes ago


Arthur Caplan, Ph.D.
• E-mail

It can be hard to separate the fact from the fiction of the myriad claims and questions separating health care reform. Some charges " that reform means the end of private insurance " are quite simply bogus. Other worries " that more insured Americans could worsen doctor shortages " are more justified.

As President Barack Obama’s health care reform plan faces a possible delay from opponents including Republicans, some conservative Democrats, health insurers and many pharmaceutical companies " it’s time to sort out the scare tactics from reality.

Claim: If millions of Americans become newly insured, there won’t be enough doctors and nurses to handle them.

Reality check: This truly is a problem but it's coming anyway. If current trends continue, the shortage of primary care physicians will reach 40,000 in a little more than 10 years, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians. Medical schools are only graduating about half the needed number of primary care doctors.

Claim: Any public program will kill private insurance plans.

Reality check: This is not going to happen. The centrality of a public plan in Obama’s health reform push is to insure that an affordable basic package of services is available to all Americans, regardless of their health problems or health status. By pooling a large number of currently uninsured people into this plan, along with some others currently holding insurance, the cost of insurance should come down.

Claim: Health reform is moving too fast.

Reality check: Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., recently addressed this idea when he said, "President Obama was right about one thing: He said if it's not done quickly, it won't be done at all. Why did he say that? Because the longer it hangs out there, the more the American people are skeptical, anxious and even in opposition to it."

Well, the senator has a point but not for the reason he thinks. The longer reform stalls, the more the forces of the status quo can try to kill it.

Claim: Reform will result in the government rationing health care.

Reality check: This is perhaps the scariest argument about health care. Even supporters of reform acknowledge rationing could happen.

The main flaw with this criticism is that it implies we are not rationing health care now, that rationing will become a new feature in the post-reform American health care scene.


Claim: Health care reform will increase long-term federal spending on health care, thereby ballooning an already rapidly escalating deficit.

Reality check: Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf told the Senate Budget Committee in early July that the reform bills now circulating in Congress will lead to greater federal spending in future years. The Obama administration and some Democratic proponents of reform wished very hard that Elmendorf would go away. However, his caution has to be taken seriously.


Reality check: The chairman of the Republican Party Michael Steele has been comparing President Obama’s health care overhaul to socialism.

This complaint is not worth five seconds of your time. Quick " name the biggest government-run health care system in the world. If you said the Veterans Administration health system, you would be correct. Yet, instead of calling to dismantle the VA, most Republicans want to see more money spent on the system.


Claim: Health care reform will create a mind-boggling web of bureaucracy.

Reality check: Reform critics have taken to trotting out a complicated-to-follow flow chart showing the complexity of the Democratic proposal, a tactic meant to turn Americans against the reform plan. But bureaucracy is already choking health care in the United States. There could not be a more complex, inefficient, frustrating and absurd bureaucracy than the system we have now.

Claim: Health reform will empower Washington " not doctors and patients " to make health care decisions.

Reality check: No one in Congress or Washington wants to play doctor. They are too busy to have any time for prescribing medication for your allergies or to tell you what surgeon to see for your gall bladder operation. With the Obama team taking a cue from the Clinton administration, there will not be any single government-run health plan.

Claim: Health reform is the end of innovation in health care.

Reality check: It is true that innovation is in trouble in an age of cost-containment. There is no way, health reform or not, that we can continue to pay for medical research and innovation the way we have done so in the past. But the way we have done so in the past is crazy.

Not much of a reality check there... it's more like propaganda that was spoon fed to MSNBC.

Foofie wrote:

With national health care everyone can then have the pleasure of the indignity of waiting endless hours to see a doctor, or doctor's assistant, just like the poor or elderly today (in a hospital emergency room). It will be another "spreading the wealth around gambit," only this time it will be indignity, not wealth.

Really? I've never seen a doctor's assistant (unless it was an approbated physician) nor has my mother - which extends the period to 90 years.
Waiting times? Well, you just phone to the praxis in advance and know when it's your turn. And if it's urgent, it's a matter of minutes.

I don't say that your expeiences with national health care could be different - there's always an exception.

Obama has no clue what's included in his gargantuan health care bill because he has not read it.
He is selling it to the dumbmasses as one thing when he knows it's another.