JAMA: National Healthcare is the way to go

Just in case anyone is still dragging their feet on getting single-payer
healthcare in America, from Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_05/008727.php
YES, NATIONAL HEALTHCARE REALLY IS THE WAY TO GO....Advocates of universal
healthcare frequently claim that European-style national healthcare systems,
aside from being fairer, are just more efficient than ours. They provide decent
healthcare at a lower cost than the jumbled, pseudo-free market system we have
in the United States.

But is it true? Do even relatively mediocre, underfunded national healthcare
systems like the one in Britain perform as well as American healthcare? A new
study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reaches a
pretty unambiguous conclusion.

The researchers studied health outcomes in both countries and controlled for age
by comparing only people aged 55-64. They controlled for race by studying only
non-Hispanic whites. They controlled for obesity. They controlled for income.
They controlled for education. They controlled for everything they could think
of. Here's what they found:

"At every point in the social hierarchy there is more illness in the United
States than in England and the differences are really dramatic," said study
co-author Dr. Michael Marmot, an epidemiologist at University College London in
England.

....The upper crust in both countries was healthier than middle-class and
low-income people in the same country. But richer Americans' health status
resembled the health of the low-income British.

The researchers are careful to say that their study doesn't prove that Britain's
healthcare system is better than America's -- something that would be nearly
impossible to demonstrate conclusively with a study like this in any case. But
that's not the point. The point is that it's obviously not worse even though the
British spend about half as much as we do per capita.

So here's the deal: under the British system, you don't have to worry about
which doctors your HMO allows you to see. You don't have to worry about losing
coverage if you get laid off. You don't have to worry about being unable to get
a new job because you have a pre-existing condition. You don't have to worry
about being bankrupted if you contract a serious chronic illness. And large
corporations don't have to worry about going out of business because of
spiraling healthcare obligations.

And the result of all this? Healthcare that's as good as ours and delivered for
about half the cost. Under a national healthcare system, when you get sick, all
you have to worry about is getting well. Explain to me again why we're afraid of
this?