Yesterday was my brother's birthday; he's officially in his late 40s now. He's currently in Shanghai, having just been laid off two days ago by the American company for which he's worked for the past couple of years, and trying to figure out what he's going to do next. I caught up with him by phone and we had a long chat about many things, but one of the key things was health care.
His opinion: Obama isn't going far enough, and should have pushed for a single payer system. Profit doesn't belong in health care. Health is not something for which you can comparison shop. It is time to drop the consumer model.
My brother is in no way a liberal.
My brother (let's call him Steve) has been living in Japan on and off for about 15 years now. His wife, a Japanese woman, works in a bank, and they have two sons aged 11 and 7. Unfortunately for Steve, they all live with his mother-in-law. This situation is not likely to change any time soon, if at all.
Steve is in no way a liberal. He voted for Bush the first time (though not the second) because he thought Bush would be better for business than Gore. He voted for Reagan, I believe, as well. He believes Ron Paul has some good ideas about returning to the gold standard. I'd definitely call my brother a conservative, although he voted for Obama.
Despite being laid off, Steve and the entire family have their health care paid for for somewhat more than the next year. Steve is not worried about his family being able to obtain care.
From what he has told me, the Japanese regularly engage in what our politicians of both parties describe as "overusing" health care. At the slightest sign of a sniffle, they take their children to the clinic. If the child registers a temperature of 99, it's off to the clinic. There are many clinics and anyone on the system can go in without an appointment. The longest time he has had to wait in the clinic before being seen is half an hour, and that was only once; usually the patient is seen within ten minutes. When someone in Japan needs something more than can be provided in the clinic, they usually seem to wind up in the hospital for at least a week. The hospital is scrupulously clean, and MRSA is pretty much unheard of.
Steve says that when you take into account his care, his wife's, and his two sons, he may pay as much as $4,000 out of pocket during the year for all four of them combined. There are no other co-pays, no deductibles, no co-insurance. There is no question that every part of the body is covered.
One evening he found himself at work with an infected tooth that required a root canal. He and his friend went to a dentist who had a good relationship with his employer at the time, and although it was already 7:30 p.m. and the dentist was closing up, he insisted that my brother come in and allow him to take a look at what was going on. He informed my brother that he had an infection and needed a root canal, and set back up to perform it right then and there. 45 minutes later he was finished, including placing a temporary filling, telling my brother (who was scheduled to return to the States shortly thereafter) to go to his U.S. dentist and have him finish up. The dentist refused all payment, though my brother pressed him.
Steve then returned to the U.S. and scheduled an appointment with his U.S. dentist. The U.S. dentist removed the temporary filling and took a look, and said that the Japanese dentist had done beautiful work, leaving almost nothing for him to do. He then enlarged the hole and fitted my brother for a crown. My brother's co-pay in the U.S.: over $900.
We started talking about the current U.S. attempt to reform health care, and my conservative brother said flat-out that Obama wasn't going far enough towards real reform; the U.S. needs to move to a single payer model, in his opinion, and get the profit factor out of health care entirely. Nobody should be making a profit on someone becoming ill, he said. It is completely wrong. Whether or not people become ill is not under their control, and you can't comparison shop for health care or for good health the way you can for something like auto insurance. Moreover, having a car is optional; having a body is not.
He feels that the inclusion of a profit motive keeps people from getting the care that they need the way they would in Japan. He does not want to wind up back in the States under the U.S. health care system the way it is now, and will do everything in his power to avoid moving back here. At the moment, he is in Shanghai, PRC; he feels that even Chinese health care, where there really is no system, is better than the U.S. health care system. And this is coming from a conservative businessman whose chief concern is in the furtherance of business interests; but he's lived with both the American and the Japanese health care system and has had ample opportunity to compare and contrast the two.
He's not sure what he's going to do next; he may start his own business in his line of work. This is considered a major risk, however, and the Japanese frown on taking risks, especially where one's family's livelihood is concerned; he may get a lot of pushback from his wife and mother-in-law about this, and, in fact, expects just that. He may attempt to return to the company he worked for a couple of years ago; this is what he says his wife will recommend as his only option. He is considering all of his options. The one thing he will not do, he says, is return to the States and subject himself to the U.S. health care system.
Steve is entrepreneurial, extremely intelligent, thoughtful, and insightful when it comes to business...and we've lost him and the jobs he would create. We lost him due to our lousy health insurance system, since he's had a chance to live with a different system and finds it far superior.