Dr. Errington Thompson

I spent a good deal of time over the last year or so reading up on healthcare and healthcare policy. I came to the conclusion that the best way to reform healthcare is to have the government pay for it: universal healthcare. This is the only way that I have found through which we will be able to deliver cost-effective, high quality healthcare.

Phony objections to reform

I’ve mentioned universal healthcare on my radio show (880 AM, WPEK, Saturday mornings at 9 a.m.) and on my blog on numerous occasions. The most frequent comments I’ve come across are that we’re just making a big government bigger, that government isn’t the solution but the problem (a famous Reagan quote that has been parroted a billion times), and simply that government can’t do anything right (Iraq, Social Security and Hurricane Katrina, to name a few). All I can do is smile when I see these comments.

The United States government is us, Americans. The United States government hasn’t been taken over by aliens from outer space or by the Russians. If the government is inefficient, it is because we want the government to be inefficient. If we want the government to work correctly, we need to demand that.

We need to pressure our politicians to spend our money wisely and vigorously oppose building bridges to nowhere. If you are upset that we’re spending $900 for a toilet seat in the Pentagon, then you need to write your congressman (all politicians respond to pressure).

Private-sector shibboleths

For some reason, the idea that the private sector is somehow more efficient and more effective than the government has been perpetuated throughout American society. I completely reject this notion. Here are a few examples of private sector efficiency.

•    Twelve of our brave soldiers have died by electrocution while taking a shower because of faulty wiring privately contracted by Kellogg, Brown and Root.

•    The computer giant Microsoft outsources a lot of its code writing, which may account for a lot of the problems we’re seeing in Microsoft Vista. Many Vista users had to completely wipe their hard drives and reinstall Vista in order to install Service Pack 1, which was designed to fix all the bugs in the original release. The whole process took between three and six hours.

•    As published in the Washington Post, the Senate Commerce Committee released a report explicitly stating that, “…insurers go to great lengths to avoid responsibility for sick people, use deliberately incomprehensible documents to mislead customers about their benefits, and sell ‘junk’ policies that do not cover needed care.”

•    Just last week, according to an operator at Charter Communications, Internet service went down for all of North and South Carolina.
Reform that will work

Here are some steps that will ensure public-sector success: 1) Roll Medicare and Medicaid into universal healthcare. Keep payroll taxes at the same rate but applied to a higher income threshold. 2) Eliminate the need for private or employer-based insurance (wealthy citizens can always buy private insurance on their own). This will help all businesses’ bottom line, save over $700 billion in non-medical costs, and allow us to cover the 46 million Americans who are currently uninsured. 3) Control costs by negotiating drug prices. 4) Pay primary practitioners to take care of a population of patients. 5) Pay bonuses to practitioners who do an outstanding job with their patient pool (controlling major diseases like hypertension, diabetes, and congestive heart failure). 6) Develop an arbitration system to bring down medical liability costs. 7) With all medical providers in the same, universal system, Americans will still be able to choose their own doctors and hospitals. 8) Give tax breaks (incentives) to large medical practices that open early and stay open late and on weekends to improve healthcare access. Patients shouldn’t have to take off from work to see their doctor.