SOCIALISM !!!
Many Americans intensely dislike the idea that we might learn useful policy ideas from other countries, particularly in medicine.
The leaders of the health care industry and the medical profession, not to mention the political establishment, have a single, all-purpose response they fall back on whenever somebody suggests that the United States might usefully study foreign health care systems: "But it's socialized medicine!"
This is supposed to end the argument. The contention is that the United States, with its commitment to free markets and low taxes, could never rely on big-goverment socialism the way other countries do. . . . In U.S. policy debates, the term "socialized medicine" has been a powerful polictical weapon - even though nobody can quite define what it means.
The term was popularized by a public relations firm working for the American Medical Association in 1947 to disparage President Truman's proposal for a national health care system.
It was a label, at the dawn of the cold war, meant to suggest that anybody advocating universal access to health care must be a communist.
And the phrase has retained its polictal power for six decades.
There are two basic flaws, though, in this argument.
1. Most national health care systems are not "socialized". . . . Many foreign countries provide universal health care of high quality at reasonable cost using private doctors, private hospitals, and private insurance plans. . . . Japan has more for-profit hospitals than the United States.
2. "Socialized medicine" may be a scary term, but in practice, Americans rather like government-run medicine. . . . In the Medicare system, covering about 44 million elderly or disabled Americans, the federal government makes the rules and pays the bills.
. . . So the problem isn't "socialism". The real problem with those foreign health care systems is that they're foreign. That offends the mind-set - sometimes referred to as American exceptionalism - that says our strong, wealthy and enormously productive country is sui generis and doesn't need to borrow any ideas from the rest of the world.
Anybody who dares to say that other countries do something better than we do is likely to be labeled un-patriotic or anti-American . . .
This is nonsense. The real patriot, the person who genuinely loves his county, is the person who recognizes its problems and tries to fix them.
from The Healing of America, by T.R. Reid
Orignal From: SOCIALISM !!!
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