Toward European Health Care

Right in the thick of the debate about establishing a federally controlled health care system in this country, my daughter, studying in Rome, ran smack into European health care.  It started out not to be an emergency, but after a couple of days and several contacts with the system, it became one. Once they took the problem seriously and hospitalized her, she got wonderful care.

One cannot assess an entire system based upon one experience with it.  But a common criticism of Italian universal health care is that there's a bias against proactive prevention... in favor of waiting until there's an emergency to take a problem seriously.  Proponents of national health care here in America claim we'll realize huge savings from practicing more preventative medicine.  Perhaps Italy, whose universal system has been in place since 1978, has learned it doesn't work that way.

Health care socializers here in America complain doctors order too many tests, one of the reasons our system is so expensive. But there's something reassuring about a doctor thinking through the possibilities that could be causing your acute symptoms rather than sending you home with a prescription he hopes will work.

It took several days and finally a trip to the emergency room to figure out my daughter had a bee sting which was, by that time, badly infected. That Saturday night I prayed for her pain ...and that the 2000-page Pelosi bill would go down to defeat. It passed narrowly, curiously, due to a pro-life amendment.

The World Heath Organization ranks the Italian system number two, just after France's. They rank the U.S. number 37. But a common criticism in the French and Italian plans is that they're underfunded. Soaring costs are pushing both systems into crisis.  As Congress fights over whether America's system should be more like France, the French government is trying free market solutions that would make its plan more like what exists here..

The only way to make a national universal health care system work is to focus mostly on costs. Better to encourage the free market which is normally great at finding efficiencies. Rather than squelch the entrepreneurial spirit in medicine, we should foster it. Profits encourage creativity and innovation allowing the system to get better at helping patients. 

The health care system needs reform. But what's being debated right now is not about making health care more available and affordable for people. It's about putting federal bureaucracies in control of a large portion of the economy and involving government in the most personal of individual concerns. The push is, according to the Wall Street Journal "...intended to make the middle class more dependent on government through the 'umbilical cord' of universal health care."

Minnesota Congressman Paul Ryan, who has his own conservative plan to reform health care agrees .  He told reporters the House bill replaces the American idea with a European-style social-welfare state. We won't like such a system.  Let's not get stuck with it.