Fort Worth Star Telegram (TX), August 14, 2007
Forsyth County News, August 14, 2007

Think Tank: Healthcare

Private taxes make the U.S. system 'Sicko'

Michael Moore’s new movie, Sicko, paints a vivid picture of the abundance of services provided to French citizens by their government.

Taxes account for 44 percent of the French economy versus 25 percent in the U.S. Although French taxes are higher, French corporations pay a greater share of the nation’s tax burden than U.S. corporations do.

In the 1950s, corporate taxes paid for 28 percent of the U.S. government’s expenses. Today corporations pay about 10 percent. U.S. corporate taxes as a percentage of total economic output is the third lowest among industrialized nations. To compare the French and U.S. systems, we have to adjust for all the services the French government pays for with tax revenue: healthcare, subsidized day care and long-term elder care for the poor.

French businesses and families pay no health premiums. They pay nothing for prescription drugs deemed essential. Each of these things, and many others, that U.S. families pay represent private taxes.

Healthcare is our most significant private tax. In 2005 the United States spent $2 trillion on healthcare, our largest national investment. Of this $2 trillion, the government pays for $800 billion through Medicare, Medicaid and the Veterans Administration. The rest is a private tax exacted from Americans by corporations such as Aetna, Pfizer, Manor Care and Walgreens.

They provide the services that in every other industrialized nation are provided by government. If we add the non-governmental share of healthcare spending to the nation’s tax bill, we see the share of the American economy devoted to taxes — public and private — rise to nearly 36 percent.

Private taxes have a chunk taken out for corporate profits. Healthcare companies have some of the highest profits in industry today.

Maybe the tax cut we should demand is one in our private tax burden — that share that inflates corporate profits. Shifting essential public services, such as healthcare, to the public sector has improved the quality of life and cut costs in other industrialized nations. It’s time to cut private taxes.

-- Scott Klinger, United for a Fair Economy

Should the U.S. use Canada as its model for healthcare reform?

YES

SASKATOON, Saskatchewan — For more than 40 years Canada’s Medicare has improved the quality of life for tens of millions of people.

I’m the owner of a company in Canada and another in the United States that distribute fresh produce around the globe. My Canadian company has three corporate advantages over my U.S. company and our U.S. competitors: healthy workers, lower operating costs and better worker safety through social cohesion.

Healthy workers are more productive because they take less sick time than those who don’t, or can’t afford to, take care of their health. Those who ignore early symptoms of an illness because their credit cards are maxed-out end up being less productive and might have to leave the work force. Then the employer faces the expense of training replacement workers.

My U.S. company pays, on average, a premium of $9,300 per year for each employee to provide basic medical insurance. My Canadian firm pays no premium. The costs are paid out of taxes and from resource royalties.

Universal healthcare provides a social cohesion and increases our general security by helping to lift people out of poverty. A healthy population with access to healthcare is more likely to be productive and beneficial. The rates of violent crime in Canada have yet to reach even a shadow of those in America.

The economic reasons for universal medical coverage are clear.

-- David Karwacki, Liberal Party, Saskatchewan

NO

Canada’s healthcare system is heartless and uncaring. I’ve seen it firsthand.

In 1999, my uncle in Vancouver was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. I began investigating treatments.

I discovered that a the new drug Rituxan had shown enormous success in fighting the disease. But it wasn’t approved in Canada, so it was unavailable to my uncle. Had he lived in America, he might have survived.

When the government pays for healthcare, saving money is more important than saving lives. So bureaucrats have an incentive to delay — or deny — the introduction of new, costly drugs.

Diminished access to physicians, surgeries and other procedures harm ordinary Canadians, but such rationing is necessary to keep costs down.

The average wait in Canada between a referral from a primary care doctor to treatment by a specialist was around nine weeks in 1993; now it takes over four months. That’s almost double what doctors consider clinically reasonable.

Indeed, over 800,000 Canadians are currently on waiting lists for surgery and other necessary treatments. Canada now ranks 24th out of 28 countries in the number of doctors per thousand people, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. When the government took over the healthcare system in the early ’70s, Canada ranked second.

Why the decline? Over the past decade, about 11 percent of physicians trained in Canadian medical schools have moved to the U.S. Doctors’ salaries are paid for by provincial governments and subject to cost-conscious budget analysts. The average Canadian doctor earns only 42 percent of what his U.S. counterpart earns.

--Sally C. Pipes, Pacific Research Institute

By the numbers

9.9 -- Percentage of Canada’s gross domestic product spent on healthcare.

15.3 -- Percentage of U.S. gross domestic product spent on healthcare.

100 -- Number of new drugs introduced in the U.S. between 1997 and 1999.

43 -- Number of those drugs that became available in Canada during that period.

0, 50 -- Number of states in 1990 and 2005, respectively, where more than 14 percent of adults were clinically obese.

--Sources: Organization for Economic Development; Pacific Research Institute; Harper’s Magazine; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

"Access to a waiting list is not access to health care. ...[T]here is unchallenged evidence that in some serious cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public healthcare."

-- Beverly McLaughlin, chief justice of Canada’s Supreme Court, in a 2005 decision