Americans are donning jaded visors – and being wittingly hoodwinked. When it comes to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), we’ve been handed a dearth of transparency, while sinking into a turbid lagoon of parody and perversion.
Political and academic bellowing has been vociferous, seemingly ubiquitous, and too often blindly adopted. For years Americans have listened to the pundits and partisans herald facts about America’s cost-prohibitive and undeniably disparate health care system, and they’ve been all too willing to accept the only alternative presented.
Countless Americans are operating under the impression that the PPACA will provide them with comprehensive, affordable, quality health care coverage that they believe Canadians and Europeans enjoy. But studies show that Americans have significantly lower cancer mortality rates than both Canadians and Europeans. Breast cancer mortality is 9 percent higher in Canada, 52 percent higher in Germany, and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom than in the US. In the UK, the mortality rate for prostate cancer is 604 percent higher than in the US. In Norway, it’s 457 percent higher. And among British men and women, colorectal cancer is approximately 40 percent higher than it is for men and women in the US (Atlas 2009).
What most Americans don’t realize is that they also enjoy greater access to treatments for chronic diseases than Canadians and Europeans. Of those Americans who are candidates for statin drugs (medications designed to reduce cholesterol and inhibit heart disease), more than half (56%) are using them, while only 36 percent of Dutch, 29 percent of Swiss, 26 percent of Germans, 23 percent of Brits, and 17 percent of Italians who could benefit from statin drugs are actually receiving them (Atlas, 2009).
It would similarly surprise most Americans to learn that our ailing health care system provides greater access to preventative cancer treatments than that afforded Canadians. Almost 90% of middle-aged American women, as compared to 72% of Canadian women, have had a mammogram. Fifty-four percent of American men, as compared to 16% of Canadians, have had a prostate specific antigen (PSA) test, and approximately 30% of Americans have had a colonoscopy, while 5% of Canadians have had one (Atlas, 2009).
Americans have been merrily misinformed regarding the economic realities of adopting a Canadian-comparable health care system. According to John C. Goodman, Ph.D., founder and president of the National Center for Policy Analysis and a Senior Fellow for the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, economic studies have shown that the financial burden of a universal Medicare program would be twice as high as the administrative costs of universal private coverage (Goodman, 2007). And while the most common argument for national health insurance is that it will give low-income and uninsurable folks equal access to health care, it is instructive that among the nonelderly, white populations of both the US and Canada, low-income Canadians are 22 percent more likely to be in poor health than Americans (Goodman, 2007).
Americans have alternatives – to the existing, exclusive, disparate, inaccessible, unaffordable health care system – and to ObamaCare, a program that has little hope of accomplishing its desired ends. In 2010, 15 percent of employers with 500 or more employees had established clinics that were providing primary-care services to employees and another 10 percent of employers indicated that they were considering providing similar services in 2010 or 2011. The costs for on-site clinic services are typically lower than community-based clinics. Some are free. Their proximity to work and greater affordability makes it more likely that employees will get annual check-ups, receive treatment for health issues that they might otherwise have ignored, submit to testing that might engender a healthy lifestyle change, or receive referrals to specialists that could prove live-saving (Andrews, 2011). While on-site clinics are not the answer to the health care dilemma, they are potentially part of an as yet undefined, creative, viable, cost-effective solution – one that is actually being threatened by the PPACA.
As many as 78 million Americans are at risk of losing employer health coverage if and when the PPACA goes into effect. Fifty percent of employers, according to a McKinsey & Company survey, will or are likely to seek alternatives to their current health-insurance plans if ObamaCare is implemented. Among those at risk of losing their health insurance coverage are an estimated 156 million non-elderly Americans (Turner, 2011).
Before the PPACA passed, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that only 9 to 10 million people who currently get health insurance through their employers would switch to government-subsidized insurance. The McKinsey report, however, forecasts that employers will drop employee health insurance coverage altogether, limit the employees to whom coverage is offered, or present defined contributions for insurance. Among those employers with a high awareness of the health-reform law, it is expected that more than 50% are likely to stop providing a health insurance benefit to their employees (Turner, 2011).
But again, Americans have alternatives. In 1996, Congress passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA). The portability clause provides that as long as an insured has "proof of creditable coverage" for18 months or more without a lapse of more than 63 days, he (or she) is given "credit" for prior coverage and entitled to coverage for any "pre-existing" medical condition when changing insurance carriers. However, "portability" protection was allotted only to those persons insured on an employer sponsored group health insurance policy. If the portability clause were extended to self-employed entrepreneurs, small business owners, individuals and families, nearly 14 million insured Americans wouldn’t have to worry about being denied coverage for a “pre-existing” illness (Tucker, 2011).
For those who are uninsured, have access to government assistance and have chosen not to take advantage of it, there is little reason to believe that they would take advantage of the benefits afforded them under the PPACA, under which the annual penalty for failing to purchase health insurance is $95 or 1% of one's income - and when the IRS is proscribed from assessing criminal fines against those who refuse to comply with the individual responsibility mandate. The threat that the IRS will withhold an individual’s tax return for non-compliance means nothing to approximately half of all U.S households who (as of 2009) paid no income tax (Tucker, 2011).
It’s time for Americans to step out of the fog. It’s time for vigilance, time to consider the facts, time for creative solutions, time for informed and pragmatic choices. It’s time to operate from fact – not fiction. It’s time to make decisions grounded in a framework of both personal responsibility and communal accountability, not some unconstitutional, overreaching congressional mandate that makes a mockery of our united promise “to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” We the people need to establish justice in a more reasoned, insightful, equitable, fiscally responsible, and fruitful way.
References
Atlas, Scott W. (July 1, 2009). Ten reasons why America’s health care system is in better condition than you might suppose. Hoover Digest. Stanford University.
Goodman, John C. (December 14, 2007). Does Socialism Work? Debunking the Myth. Georgia Public Policy Foundation. Retrieved at
Andrews, Michelle. (May 24, 2011). Many On-The-Job clinics Offer Primary Care, Kaiser Health News, May 24, 2011 retrieved at
Turner, Grace-Marie (June 8, 2011). No, You Can’t Keep Your Health Insurance. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved at
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