Amy Traub

SOCIALIZED MEDICINE!

If only this blog enabled me to use a scarier font to write those words.

Apparently, they’re among the most frightening words in the English language. They’re so scary that conservatives are hoping they’ll be sufficient to preserve the privileges of insurance companies, pharmaceutical corporations and medical device manufacturers that have helped to make the American health care system among the most expensive – and least effective among advanced economies – in the world.

There are at least two significant problems with that strategy. First, the words themselves ain’t all that scary. A 2008 Harris Poll found that a plurality of Americans think a socialized medical system would be an improvement over the nation’s health care status quo. You read that right: when faced with the words “socialized medicine” 45% of Americans said it beats what we’ve got now. Just 39% were convinced it would be worse. Maybe the pollsters should be using scarier voices.

Then there’s the reality issue. Nobody’s actually proposing socialized medicine in the United States. The closest proposals before Congress would set up a single-payer system – effectively a socialization of the insurance system but not of health care delivery. And even that isn’t where Congress and the Obama Administration are heading.

Instead, President Obama’s health proposal sets up a public insurance system to compete with – not replace – private insurers. The President also envisions using the power of our existing public programs, Medicare and Medicaid, to make medical treatment more effective and cost-efficient. As we discussed on our analysis of Obama’s Address to Congress this is a vital step toward reining in health care costs. Of course, drug companies have become one of the most profitable industries in the country because of their success at getting patients to ask for, and physicians to prescribe, expensive new drugs that may be no more effective than the cheap old ones. It’s no wonder that they would resist reform. They’ll even call it socialized medicine if they think it will preserve those robust profits.

President Obama has already delivered on health care in a big way. 7 million out-of-work Americans have access to subsidized health coverage thanks to the stimulus bill. 11 million kids are covered thanks to SCHIP. We are computerizing health records and funding research into effective medical treatments. The not-so-scary specter of socialized medicine hasn’t held us back from these successes and shouldn’t block the path ahead.

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Posted at 8:27 AM, Mar 05, 2009 in Health Care
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