Our uniquely American health care system is noted for its high prices for relative mediocrity. Some contend that our pharmaceutical industry provides an exception. It doesn't. We are paying high prices for new chemical entities that over 85 percent of the time are providing us with no real benefit over existing products.
Many contend nevertheless that innovations provided by U.S. pharmaceutical firms are well worth our very high prices. Yet productivity of European pharmaceutical firms remains even higher, and they are able to provide new products at much lower prices.
When reform advocates look at the excessive costs of U.S. health care, two favorite targets are the private insurance industry and the pharmaceutical firms. Policies that would reduce these burdens are no secret. Physicians for a National Health Program has described policies that would eliminate the private insurance burden. Arjun Jayadev and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, in the article cited above, provide examples of policies that would increase value in our purchasing of pharmaceuticals.
So what is Congress's response? They intend to expand the dysfunctional private insurance markets, and use more of our tax money for subsidies. For the biotech industry they are expanding data exclusivity thereby keeping generics off the market for longer periods. Reform is going to bring us more overpriced, inadequate private insurance plans and more overpriced pharmaceuticals/biologics.
Tell Congress that reform is not about enhancing the business models of the insurance and pharmaceutical firms. It’s about making health care affordable and accessible for everyone. Go back and get it right. Read it all at PNHP's Official Blog
In July 2008 NPR presented a great series of programs called, "Taking The Measure Of Health Care In America" - worth listening to if you missed it then. As part of this program, they prepared An International Comparison: "Countries with governments and economies similar to the United States have come up with a variety of methods to make sure that all of their citizens receive health care. While residents in Europe and Japan may pay higher insurance premiums or taxes than Americans, in the end, when all costs are added up, Americans spend more money on health care per person — with fewer people covered."
By Joe Conason | Salon:
The Europeans spend more money on social programs than we do -- and get great results, in everything from universal childcare to tuition-free higher education.
April 3, 2009 | If the world is no longer enthralled by the “old Washington consensus” of privatization, deregulation and weak government, as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown proclaimed at the London G-20 summit, then now it is surely time to reconsider what that consensus has meant for us over the past three decades. We could begin by looking across the Atlantic at the “social market” nations of Europe -- where support for families and children is less rhetorical and more real than here.
Most coverage of the summit failed to observe the stinging irony of the debate over stimulus spending that brought the United States into conflict with France and Germany. Today’s American demand that the French and Germans (along with the rest of wealthy Europe) should spend much more on government programs and infrastructure contrasts rather starkly with the traditional American criticism of Europeans for spending too much. So when the French and other Europeans note pointedly that their societies routinely spend much more than ours to protect workers, women, the young, the elderly, and the poor from economic trouble, they’re merely making a factual observation. (France spends as much as 1.5 percent of GDP annually on childcare and maternity benefits alone.) Different as we are in culture and history, we might even learn something from their example, now that the blinding ideology of the past has been swept away.
By now, most Americans ought to know that Europeans treat healthcare as a public good and a human right, which means that they spend billions of tax dollars annually to insure everyone (although they spend less overall on the medical sector than we do). What most Americans probably still don’t know is that those European medical systems are highly varied, with private medicine and insurance playing different roles in different countries. Expensive as universal quality care has inevitably become, as technology improves and populations age, the Europeans broadly believe in their social security systems -- because they provide competitive advantage as well as moral superiority.
From Europe’s perspective, the same can be said of the support its governments provide to families, from the entitlements available to pregnant women and new mothers and fathers, to universal child care and tuition-free higher education, to the special benefits that assist single parents. The challenges that working families face in a globalizing world where both parents work are mitigated by policies designed to encourage balance between home and workplace and adequate attention to children.
These "socialist" measures to protect families are far more effective, of course, than all of the Sunday shouting from American pulpits about the Biblical way of life. Perhaps the leadership of the religious right, still obsessed with stigmatizing gay couples, should take note. It is true that globalization, aging and immigration have imposed severe pressure on the budgets of European countries, and the trend of increasing benefits that continued until a decade ago has been reversed. But it is also undeniable that despite those pressures, public and political support for the social market economy remains strong across Europe, and that free-market fundamentalism is a thoroughly discredited alternative. The old argument that the social market is unsustainable and hinders growth was never persuasive on close inspection. And the old expectation that outmoded European systems would eventually collapse into imitating ours has been swept away, along with the rest of the Washington consensus. Now perhaps we can honestly consider what America might learn from them.
More than 44 million Americans lack health insurance, the highest number in any industrialized country, and another 38 million are under-insured.
In these bleak surroundings, European-style social safety nets look attractive even to rugged individualists, particularly those affected by the downturn. Even before the present crisis, polls showed growing support for government programs to help those in need. A 2007 Pew survey, for example, showed 69 percent supporting the notion that government should take care of people who can’t care for themselves.
Unfettered capitalism this is not. In the Internet debate prompted by Republican warnings of the impending Europeanization of America, one commentator asked: “Does this mean that the half million Americans losing their jobs each month can count on having health care, public transportation, quality education and a public safety net?” It is our Government - Let's use it!
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