The Daily Background

Rudy Giuliani has, time and time and time again, when asked about his position on health care reform and extending coverage to all Americans, relied on the tired and obviously untrue line that America’s for-profit health care system is the best in the world.

Every other Western industrialized nation is wrong, he says, in instituting universal health care, except for America. According to Giuliani, those two dozen other countries are the ones doing things wrong, and America is the only one that’s doing things right. Even though they somehow manage to live longer than us on average in many of those countries.

The 18,000 or so Americans who die every year because they lack health care, and the 45 million Americans who could easily become the 18,001st person simply don’t have health insurance because they don’t want it, not because they can’t afford it, according to Giuliani’s draconian beliefs.

American health care is great for those who have insurance, as Giuliani says, but his assertion that it’s great for everyone is absurd. Giuliani has maintained this unmaintainable argument at least since he ran for Senate in 2000 (he dropped out after Hillary Clinton turned out to be a more formidable opponent than most had expected).

Here’s an example of Giuliani trumpeting the US health care system, in comparison to those around the world:

“We (need to) build it based on private insurance, competition, markets,” Giuliani said.

Giuliani noted that even with the current “imperfect” health care system stories of residents from Europe, Canada and other countries coming to the United States for state-of-the-art medical treatment are common but stories of American’s traveling to other countries for medical treatment are rare at best.

He has echoed the same line over and over again. But the way he puts it, it sounds as though these are everyday people who want to get better treatment in the United States. Which of course isn’t true– it’s only the richest of the rich who come from Europe to the United States for medical treatment. In fact, contrary to Giuliani’s claims that Americans aren’t going abroad for health care, comes this report today from a medical magazine:

Soaring U.S. medical costs are causing many Americans to take to the skies on “medical tourism” junkets, looking for high-quality yet low-priced health care at foreign clinics.
[…]
The surge in medical tourism over the past decade is being driven by rising U.S. health-care costs and growing numbers of uninsured or under-insured Americans, said Josef Woodman, the author of a guidebook on the topic called Patients Beyond Borders.

And of course, senior citizens have been going to Canada (where they live two years longer on average, with their free universal health care system and yet supposedly get worse care than us) for lower-priced and perfectly-safe prescription drugs for ages now.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog