I thank Bob Lacher for his brutally honest and illuminating letter about the cost of his father’s medical care. The ghastly cost of medical care in this country is a function of the payment system, if you can call something so opaque and dysfunctional a system at all.
Here, unlike in more advanced nations, such as our neighbor Canada, health care is not a human right or a public good but a simple commodity, to be sold to the highest bidders; and capitalism, as we know, decrees that there can’t be winners without losers, so too bad for you losers out there. Foreign counterparts of American pharmaceuticals cost a fraction of the American versions, which enjoy a protected market to keep their patents eternal and their prices high.
Doctors in more advanced nations, such as France and Germany, are compensated much less than their American colleagues, even though their patients are just as well-served. But in those countries, doctors usually work for themselves or in small group practices, whereas most American doctors are now just employees of big corporations, whose interest is not availability of health care but profit. The old community hospital, which gave a good basic level of care, has practically ceased to exist. To get care at all now, we must go into a medical center, which is a looming tower of very costly specialties — for all of which even basic care patients are paying.
Don’t blame the doctors; they need high earnings to pay off the gargantuan amounts they borrowed for their training. Because that’s something else that here, unlike in more advanced nations, such as Argentina, Finland and Poland, is just another commodity: a university education.
— Dan Weber
Anchorage
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