Community Columnist--Socialism and health care: It works

Let’s talk about the dreaded “S” word. No, not sex. But ... hold on for a sec... socialism.

Talk radio seems to be obsessed that socialism is about to run rampant over us unless we take to the bunkers. Gun sales have skyrocketed and ammo is getting hard to get. Speak of defacto militias! Talk radio and their bed partners in print seem to have convinced the convincible that just around the next corner Obama is about to suspend the Constitution, replace it with a politburo, declare martial law and impose socialism on all of us.

The mantra is that socialism is bad, therefore any fruit from that tree must also be bad.

Let’s see if this is true. So we are all on the same page, let’s go to a dictionary and define socialism. I am using the Oxford American Dictionary and I am condensing it but not changing it: Production, distribution and exchange should be regulated or controlled by the community.

Now let’s see where that leaves us. For starters, it appears that the FBI falls smack into the middle of that category. What! A socialist FBI? But they are regulated, paid and their production is controlled by the community (read government). And then there is the police department and the fire department and the CIA and then, of course, the Army and the Navy and the Air Force and the Coast Guard, and let’s not forget the Marine Corps. The Marine Corps is a socialistic organization? Well, I guess so. And let’s not forget the VA.

According to the mantra, all of these must be bad. But are they really? Each has had its problems, such as the alleged $700 toilet seat that the Air Force had to sit on for a while, but every large, privately owned and controlled corporation has had its “toilet seat” fiascos, but these dumb-mistake incidents just remained a very quiet “private venture” mistake unless it was something like Ford’s Edsel. Note that the most recent cascading crash of financial houses is a result of private leadership and private ownership.

The point here is that government regulation is not automatically bad and deregulation automatically good. When greed is salivating for the quick buck that in the end hurts the majority of us (how did your 401(k) do last year?) strong regulations with strong enforcement powers are needed. The market does not regulate itself. Sources for this heresy are simple. Look at history: 1929, 1980s, 2000 and now.

Our medical system is in a mess and a leading cause of many personal bankruptcies leading to disaster. A one-payer system is not, repeat not, socialized medicine but it does cut out about 30 percent of the cost as a starter.

According to Ewe Reinhardt, Ph.D. (Princeton health economist) socialized medicine is where the government owns and operates both the financing of health care and its delivery. The VA is a perfect example of socialized medicine in the USA. If the VA system of classic socialized medicine is so evil, then why didn’t the Republicans privatize it when they had both houses and the presidency? I have several friends who have used the VA facilities in Tucson and Seattle and have yet to hear of bad treatment. I am sure that one could find a “bad treatment case,” but one can find “bad treatment cases” at any health facility.

Check into Canada’s medical system. Despite what the talk radio folk would have you believe, the Canadian system is not socialized medicine but a single-payer insurance system. Have you noticed that the sources of negative stories regarding Canada are from those with vested financial health care interests here in the U.S.? That’s a little like taking advice from your bookie on which horse to bet on. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD health data 2008), lists Canada second and the U.S. eighth in a list of eight industrialized nations in life expectancy, shows that Canada spends about 10 percent of her GDP on health care while we are spending 15.3 percent. Canada spends 16.7 percent of government revenue for health care while we spend 18.5 percent. The comparison goes on and on with the U.S. getting the least bang for the buck. After all, top CEOs need their perks.

So much for the concept that only privatization can lead to anything good.

John Milland is retired from network broadcast television and post production facilities in Los Angeles, working with both news and production departments. He has been a resident of Green Valley for 10 years.