A Lesson From Health Care About Climate Care
It’s staring us in the face and all we lack is political will.
Universal health care kicks private health care’s butt like crazy. The fact that only the U.S.A. — and their right-wing emulators behind efforts to privatize health care in places like Canada and the UK — can fail to acknowledge this ludicrously obvious fact is a source of great consternation to the remainder of the world. Both public and private models include costs like MRI machines, nursing staff, and keeping the lights on. But private health care customers also foot the bill for one additional cost that single-payer models don’t: an army of middlemen extracting profits for ever more demanding shareholders. The average Canadian pays $551 in annual health care administration costs, while insurance overhead inflates that to $2,497 for Americans. To maximize profits, you bleed away as many resources from the system as you possibly can before it stretches to the breaking point and funnel them into offshore tax havens.
That’s why the U.S.A. spends eighteen percent of its GDP on health care for inferior health outcomes, it’s the leading cause of personal bankruptcy, and seven-year-old girls have to open lemonade stands in hopes of paying for their own brain surgery. Canada spends only 11.5% of a much smaller GDP to cover literally everyone…
