My old pal, Ernie, has retired to a small house in Laos and is living under some palm trees with a real pretty woman named Kek. Back in the day, we did some work out in California together, and then later consulted on a project in Laos for a Lao-American investment group.
When it was time to go home he showed up in our hotel lobby, minus bags and traveling gear, to announce that he wasn’t leaving. He’d found a place to call home, Laos, and decided to stay there.
This past Saturday he traveled next door to Thailand and had bypass surgery. It cost him about $12,000. I had a similar deal over in Rogers, Arkansas, a few years ago. It cost $177,000. The same surgery in Germany costs $34,000 and, interestingly, the clinical outcomes – success rates – are slightly better in Germany and Thailand than they are in the United States. And no, there aren’t long waiting times for service.
Why Americans pay so much more for health care than any other people in the world isn’t a mystery. Other democratic countries have single payer systems. Americans are still arguing about who gets to make a buck off our misery – and how many bucks is okay for them to make.
What’s most perplexing about the argument is that Americans have already accepted “socialized” healthcare: Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE/CHAMPUS, CHIPS, Veterans hospitals, are all government run and regulated health care programs – and they work well. Try taking one away and even the reddest of states will quake and shake.
Democrats won some convincing victories in last week’s election, but drilling down through the numbers shows these were mostly in areas they typically win anyway. If Democrats want to secure elections outside urban corridors they need to do more than point out that the President of the United States is a walking colostomy bag. Small town America still supports Trump, but voters in mostly rural Maine voted to expand their Medicaid program to cover an additional 80,000 people. Democrats should make Medicaid expansion, and eventual universal Medicare coverage, their main policy agenda.
My pal Ernie, btw, is doing fine.
Amen, Brother. I think that the Dems who supported Bernie are firmly in favor of socialized medicine. I also think that the Republican tax plan is the first step in tat party’s moves to dismantle the ACA, then Medicaid and Medicare.
Great!