shouting loudly

Complete Tangent: Health Care

For reasons you will see below, I am suddenly compelled to write a brief post calling for a national single-payer health care plan. This is a substantial deviation from the blog’s all-things-media theme; thus, here’s a link to a discussion of how Michael Moore’s SiCKO has touched off a baseless insurance industry smear campaign of other countries’ health care.

One of the main arguments against socialized medicine is the “tragedy of the commons” claim: health care will become an overused resource, and we’ll be unable to squeeze appointments into overcrowded doctors’ schedules and be forced to waste entire days in line at overcrowded medical offices.

This cannot be news to our 3.5 readers, but follow those links; we have these problems in spades now. On these measures alone, our health care is already worse than that in Britain, Germany, Australia, and Germany. Further, these nations beat us hands down on most measures of population health.

Add in the fact that these countries insure everybody, rather than leaving roughly 1 in 6 citizens (very large PDF) out in the cold, and one must admit that socialized medicine looks pretty good.

Having just upgraded from the dreadful University of Pennsylvania student health insurance plan to my wife’s plan, I called today to make an appointment with my new primary care physician. The earliest appointment they could offer me is 35 days from now. That’s right: five weeks from today.

Let’s hear it for the efficiencies of the private sector.