Universal Health Care, Register’s Landsbaum get’s it wrong

October 4, 2007 Uncategorized 2

Yesterday, in the Orange County Register’s Editorial blog Orange Punch, Mark Landsbaum took a break from his flat earth perspective, and obsession, on global warming to tackle a report in the UK’s The Guardian about problems with the nationalized health care system in Britain.  The problem is he actually ended up pointing out that while the system in Britain has its problems, those problems are not an indictment of universal health care.  Rather, the story he cites shows that the system used by Germany and other European countries actually does work.

“Britain and Germany represent the two fundamental systems of public healthcare in Europe, with the British ‘Beveridge’ system unifying funding and provision, while the German ‘Bismarck’ system is based around a plethora of competing insurance organisations independent of health service suppliers. The survey found that the German model is delivering better results.”

“It is very hard to avoid noticing that the top five countries all have dedicated Bismarckian healthcare systems,” the report said. “While not at all arguing that the Bismarck-type healthcare systems are in every way superior, it seems that for total customer value, the Bismarck model runs rings around Beveridge.”

Universal Health Care does work. 

We can find a model that will work in the United States.  Despite what Landsbaum and the other writers at Orange Punch say, universal health care is needed and does work.  Universal health care is an example of what built our nation.  It is an example of people working together to provide for the general welfare of society.

2 Comments

  1. Amen.

    But I don’t see it happening, do you? Even Hillary’s campaign is massively funded by corporate health care. The most we’ll get is a few marginal changes that the corporations will grudgingly allow to conceal the systemic problems from the average healthy American. For example, they’ll end up allowing more children to be covered because that tends to tug hardest at the heartstrings of people fortunate enough not to know how bad things are and what sweeping reforms are truly needed.

  2. I noticed the Landsman article too. His headline “Nationalized Health Care is Lousy” was misleading. He touts something called the German Bismarckian system, which from my reading IS a type of nationalized plan.

    Maybe the British system is lousy, but not ALL nationalized healthcare is lousy.

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