This article is funny. The reality is one of the best ways to get a huge amount of monies to insure and reduce insurance costs is to remove the monies insurance companies skim from premiums simply to be a middle man between you and your doctor (30% or more). All objections to current proposed legislation, leads exactly there, to a single payer system.
Louisiana Senator David Vitter (R) is speaking on the floor of the Senate right now in favor of Byron Dorgan’s amendment allowing the "reimportation" of drugs from, among others, Canada. "This amendment gives Americans immediate relief from high prescription drug prices," he promised.
The case for drug reimportation, as Vitter says, proceeds from the recognition that residents of other countries get much, much lower prices on drugs than Americans do. Many of these drugs were invented by American companies and produced in American factories. But Canada gets them at a discount. Why?
Well, Canada’s government bargains its prices down. So does the French government, and the German government, and the British government. The results of this strategy are not in doubt: These countries pay far less than we do for the exact same drugs. Our solution? We will go to these countries and buy these drugs!
But that’s an odd solution. It’s as if Wal-mart noticed that Costco had better prices on moisturizer and so directed its employees to go buy moisturizer from Costco. But Wal-Mart is, of course, bigger than Costco! It can get better prices by negotiating on its own behalf. And it wouldn’t be paying Coscto’s mark-up, to boot.
But Medicare, and the federal government more generally, are barred from doing the same. And this isn’t just about drugs. The story is similar for everything from surgeries to doctor’s visits. It’s just harder to ship those over a border, and so there’s no demand to do so. But we could bargain prices here as surely as they can bargain them there. The fact that we can’t mimic Canada’s prices through an inefficient and illogical program doesn’t mean we couldn’t do it through a straightforward and logical one.
In closing, Vitter urged the Senate to "take this step and do what we all say should be a top priority and actually lower health-care costs. I urge all my colleagues to come together and do this in a bipartisan way." Boiled down to its essentials, Vitter just made a case for a bipartisan embrace of a single-payer system.
Photo credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP.[CONTINUED]
Ezra Klein – David Vitter and the advantages of single-payer health care