Thread: Health Crisis Is Catching

You might be wondering why I posted this. I just want you to pay a little attention to the immigration issue ekking in here and how this author seems to have almost hidden his true message so as not to bed edited out by the Dallas Morning News.


http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... d6d5f.html

The American health care system is about to get a well-deserved whipping.

New Republic senior editor Jonathan Cohn took his best shot last month with the publication of his book, Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis – and the People Who Pay the Price.

Next up is filmmaker Michael Moore with his latest docu-diatribe, Sicko. In June, Harvard Business School professor Regina Herzlinger jumps in with Who Killed Health Care? America's $2 Trillion Medical Problem – and the Consumer-Driven Cure.

Each of the above looks abroad for better ideas.

I've been on the same quest for The Dallas Morning News for nearly two years, and here's what stands out:

•First, the American approach to health care fills ordinary Europeans with dread. It is health care for those who can afford it. Everyone else, it seems to them, either does without or relies on charity.

In Berne, Switzerland, I talked with Katharina and Karl Zbinden about the national differences after Karl had a kidney transplant and then came back to the hospital for pancreatitis.

"We are very grateful to have the Swiss system, even though it's expensive. We could not afford this [care] in the United States," Katharina said.

•Second, the demand for health care workers in the United States, fed by shortsighted cost-cutting measures of the past, is worsening a global shortage. We hire one-fourth of our doctors and 7 percent of our nurses from abroad. This leaves people in southern Africa to die when adequate local medical staff could have made them well. It strips countries like the Philippines of their best, most experienced health workers.

This demand for foreign staff comes not because Americans don't want to be doctors and nurses anymore.

It's because medical and nursing schools lack the faculty and classrooms to teach all who want to come.

More than 30,000 qualified applicants are turned away from American nursing schools every year – at a time of acute nursing shortages.

The push for managed care in the 1990s led many hospitals to cut their biggest expense – nurses' salaries – by laying many off. Some of their work was shifted to hospital technicians; some was left to families of the sick.

Other factors played a role, but we are now left with 28,000 nursing vacancies in Texas alone. In three years, that's expected to reach 42,000. Nationwide, it could be 10 times that number.

The consequences of this shortage spread way beyond our shores.

Across the world, the accepted treatment regimen for tuberculosis is daily medication witnessed by a health care worker. It's called Direct Observation Therapy, or DOT.

But in sub-Saharan Africa, there's a shortage of more than 1 million doctors and nurses. So tuberculosis patients often get haphazard care and medication, which helps spawn drug-resistant strains of the disease.

Extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis – XDR-TB – is slowly making its way around the world. It is contagious, and there is no effective treatment besides quarantine. An American who caught the disease on the streets of Moscow last year has been locked up in an Arizona hospital jail ward for 10 months.

We can't tell how widespread this disease is in southern Africa because there aren't enough doctors, nurses and diagnostic tools to reach into the rural areas and urban slums where it grows.

American volunteers, like Baylor College of Medicine's Pediatric Aids Corps, can help Africans fight back. The most sensible solution, however, starts at home.

Dr. Fitzhugh Mullan of the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services wants to create a Peace Corps for medical workers. But he sees educating our own as the first priority.

"The most important thing we can do in the U.S. for stabilizing systems abroad is training enough for our own needs," said the Washington, D.C., professor.

Medical educators at UT Southwestern, the University of Texas at Arlington and other state universities agree. They've asked for more teaching positions and more money for salaries to compete with what the private sector offers.

But the Texas Legislature is about to finish its session without acting on any measure that could help educators ease the health care shortage.

With aging populations throughout Europe and much of Asia, the staffing pinch won't ease anytime soon.

Japan, which has never been comfortable with immigrant workers, is looking to humanoid robots for help with the elderly.

Meanwhile, a Canadian company is designing homes suited to the needs of the aged and infirm in hopes of easing the crunch in nursing homes.

Personal responsibility is an area of health care where Americans excel – and perform miserably. We have curbed smoking and alcohol abuse but are the most overweight nation in the world.

Lifestyle choices account for $680 billion of the $2.2 trillion Americans spend each year on health care, says Dr. Paul Handel, chief medical officer of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas.

•What perplexes foreigners most about the U.S. system is the uninsured. There are 46 million of them, with more in Texas than any other state.

One medical innovation common throughout the advanced economies of the world – everywhere, that is, except the United States – is universal health care coverage. Sometimes the government provides it, sometimes private insurers do.

Switzerland's approach takes health insurance out of the hands of employers and puts it with the consumer. Everyone has to get a policy. Eighty-seven insurance companies sell them, with the government subsidizing the cost for those who can't afford it. If you don't buy a policy and you go to a hospital without one, you'll get care, but you will also get a hefty fine.

The Swiss contain costs – though not enough, the public complains – by putting insurers and providers together to sweat out agreed prices. If local government officials don't like the resulting fee schedule, they can send it back.

Meanwhile, America's uninsured and underinsured have started going overseas to find cures they can't afford here. You can get a triple-bypass operation, a year's worth of medicine, hospital and hotel stays, plus airfare for less than $15,000 in New Delhi. Try getting that at home (sans airfare), and it will be at least 10 times that much.

Our system is broken. No one has the best model for an alternative, but Michael Moore offers a suggestion: "We should do what we always do as Americans: Steal the best things [from abroad] and make them our own."

If we don't steal, we may be shipping more dollars to foreign countries to buy.

Those price differentials luring U.S. patients abroad are beginning to attract the attention of hospitals and health insurers as well. They've begun to capture some of the cost savings by outsourcing.

A radiologist in Sydney, Australia, or Bangkok, Thailand, could easily read your X-rays, MRIs and other imagery. One day soon, you might get your insurer to pay for a hip transplant in Johannesburg, South Africa, that saves both of you a lot of money.

Good catch!!
So if we have reporters having to hedge what they really want to say you know there is a real push by our nations press to undermine the American people.