Shanelle's Post

I get so frustrated every time I hear the word Universal Health Care followed by the word
Socialized medicine. Universal Health Care in the U.S. would be no more “socialist” than
the social security or the postal system we already have. The scare tactic is built upon
the argument that Universal Health Care would put decisions about your health in the hands
of the government instead of you being able to make those decisions yourself. First of
all, Universal Health Care would allow you to make more decisions for your healthcare
because you will have more freedom to choose your type of care, hospitals, and physicians.
Moreover, people who have no access to healthcare right now don’t even have the option of
making decisions, but under a Universal Health Care system they will be able to access
health care and make decisions on their own treatments. Most of the decisions that are
made under the current system are being made by corporate bureaucrats working for private
insuran
ce companies (whose main concerns are making larger profits by denying your claims). So
wouldn’t the government being in control be better than money hungry insurance companies
being in control? Let’s not let verbal scare tactics prevent the need for universal
health care!

Kiran's Post

The United States was built on the notion of trying to get away from a governmental power. The founding fathers of this country left England primarily to get away from taxes. Today, Americans inherently cringe the idea of the government making decisions for them. When it comes to health care, the “universal health care” is looked at as a socialist system because the American people have this pre-conceived notion of the government deciding on health care services for the entire population. However, most Americans fail to acknowledge the fact that about 46 million citizens are living without health insurance. Supporters of a free market system of health care have also worked to build up the argument that universal health care is a socialist system in the minds of most of the American population. What is wrong with the government providing basic health care to all of its citizens? The health of the country will be healthier overall, which will in turn increase productivity of the nation. Going back to the Frontline video that we all saw at the beginning of the semester, each government (focusing on Europe) provided some sort of universal health care. But I wouldn’t say it was any of them are a complete socialist system—each country had a sector of private health care, which people can choose to buy. Health is a freedom that should be provided by the government, so there is a guarantee that all citizens will have access to basic health care services. The government mandates car insurance, why not health insurance??

Christine's Post

America’s fear of socialism, like it is some evil power is an interesting phenomenon to me, especially considering that the burgeoning American socialist party in the early 1900’s was a result of growing disparity of wealth in the United States. The Socialist Labor Party was mainly concerned with issues of equality both socially and in the work place. What is SO wrong with that? These fundamental ideals seemed to be lost amidst growing fears of communism. During the rise of communism, socialists were wary to associate themselves with a controversial communist system, especially after the government enacted Espionage Act. As a result, Socialist Labor Party membership dwindled in the 1950’s.
In a country founded upon capitalistic ideals, one is likely to reject any notion that implies a society of equals. While I understand the economic benefit of a free-market society, where private institutions produce and distribute goods, we should not lose sight of our obligations to others within this society. If health care is viewed as a positive right, there is an implication that social institutions have an ethical obligation to help individuals attain this right. Thus, in this particular situation, the idea of government intervention should not be such a scary thing. With the rising cost of health care premiums and little to no regulation on rising health care costs, shouldn’t someone be protecting the consumer? A government intervention that lobbies for lower consumer costs only stands to target those insurance companies who have been taking advantage of American consumers for too long.
So, while the ‘socialism’ argument is effective, it truly isn’t sound. The basic tenets of socialism aim to protect people from abuses of power and unfair distributions of wealth which have, historically led to civil unrest within countries. Exorbitant health care premiums leave close to 20% of Americans uninsured. Clearly, the free market system isn’t looking out for the average American with regards to health care. This is an absolute abuse of power that needs to be a national priority. Hopefully McCain’s ‘tax credit’ won’t be our only option.
With respect to truly socialist health systems in Europe, I suppose the countries that come the closest to this definition would be the UK and Sweden considering that about 85% of their funding comes from public expenditures and they both have high levels of public control of provisions.

Henock's Post

The fundamental achievement of capitalism is individual autonomy and promotion of individual achievement. United States Americans pride themselves on individual accomplishments that are devoid of reception of hand outs. The notion of socialism in the United States is best summed up by F.A. Hayek, “socialism strips man of his desire for success.” Also with socialism, the unalienable rights of liberty and justice are violated. This thinking has been ingrained in the minds of US citizens and anything that even remotely resembles socialism is considered “un-American” or “not Patriotic”. I mean, nobody wants to be un-patriotic right? The very idea of universal health care sends shutters down many spines of those who believe everything can and must only be obtained by an individuals own effort. Calling universal health care socialism continues to be an effective argument against guaranteeing access to care for all in the US because many feel that it would be rewarding those who do not work hard enough to obtain it.

Many argue that it would be unfair to those who earn what they gain because there will be many who take advantage of a universal health care system and abuse their new found liberties. For some reason, the idea of helping your neighbor just doesn’t seem so great when it comes to health care. Here in the US, we somehow fail to see that healthcare for all is a basic human right and not part of a “socialist conspiracy” to destroy our democracy. We already have other institutions in America that are socialist in nature, why not make health care one to?

Although some of the health systems in other countries may fall under the term “socialized medicine”, they are not truly socialist health systems by definition. There are not because they also offer other means of obtaining health care through the private sector if one chooses to.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k85RAeyYNPc

Sheila's Post

As others have already pointed out, there are no purely socialist health systems—as least among the countries we've talked about in class or studied in our readings. I agree with everyone who has discussed fear of socialism, in the context of American individualism. Collective ownership and equal distribution of goods, however, can also be feared by someone coming from a less individualistic standpoint. It may be argued that competition and an unequal society promote hard work, creativity, and other admirable characteristics. A person who rejects the idea of doling out goods and services—whether health care or anything else—may denounce it beyond the basis of just deserts. Rather, he may fear the wearing away of the ideals of hard work and creativity; he may fear the promotion of complacency and even laziness. Thus, using socialism to prevent moves towards universal health care in the U.S. works from many angles: it encourages denunciation of universal health care from those who are individualistically minded, as well as from those with more—albeit skewed—social concern.

Maybe we can learn something from the french?

I think the efficacy of using socialism to knock down almost any proposal in the U.S comes from successful propaganda effort by its opponents, primarily on the right, which effectively associated it with Marxism in general, and with communism in particular. Many leading conservatives are promoting the idea that such economic measures as tax increases, perhaps inevitable for the universal health care, will inevitably lead to socialism In a more benignly understandable way, “socialism” was associated with self-proclaimed “socialist” countries of the Soviet block with their indisputably suppressive regimes. Furthermore, it did not help that Socialist parties in Europe were also considering themselves to be Marxist, and often were defending communist regimes in opposition to the U.S. in the U.N. and other organization. Such organizations as “Communist International”, and more recently “Socialist International” whose members were at various times most left-wing parties all over the world, constantly professed their strong opposition to “American Imperialism”. All these interconnected factors contributed to strong negative reaction of most Americans to anything that sounded “Socialist”. This negative reaction is often used by right-wing politicians. Indeed, back in the 1950’s Senator Joe McCarthy used the insinuation of communism/socialism to get thousands of people fired from their jobs and even arrested on charges of treason. While we as a country are (hopefully) past that point to a degree, socialism still holds a special negative meaning for most Americans. Another reason why using the “socialist” label is an effective argument is because of the association of the word socialist to represent strictly European systems. There exists today in America a cultural divide between the United States and Europe and this divide harbors a degree of resentment. This resentment has led the American people to resist any change which could be seen as “Europonizing” the U.S

As we have seen throughout this course when one really dives into a health care system it becomes harder and harder to classify a health care system along one criteria. Thus, labels such as “socialism” are becoming fairly meaningless, other than for the propaganda purposes. But broadly speaking I would have to say that yes there do exist “socialist” health systems in Europe such as France and the U.K. and even more so in the Scandinavian countries but is it all that bad? Furthermore, one can argue in the same propaganda mode, that our Medicare system is a step toward “socialism”. What socialism really means in this context is that it is a government’s duty to ensure the social welfare of the people by enacting social reforms and policy. This is a broad definition which includes many European countries and indeed parts of the American health care system as well!

In closing, there are many health care system with “socialist” elements but it is a misleading oversimplification to call them “socialist”, and then dismiss them or refuse to learn from them simply because you are scared of the word “socialism”.

I just wanted to share this article which I found http://www.economist.com/media/pdf/Democracy_Index_2007_v3.pdf it ranks the democracies of the world according to how democratic they are. Go to page 3. Out of about 55 the U.S ranks 23! I was very surprised.

its all a scam

Since the mid-twentieth century, people in the United States have been terrified of anything that relates to socialism because of the occurrences in many socialist nations during those times. As many tactics in our government, calling universal healthcare “socialism” is simply a marketing ploy.  It is a term used by opponents to a nationalized healthcare system simply to scare people away from being interested in it and, to a certain extent, induce fear.  Fear tends to shut people down to the point that they refuse to listen to any opinion that is not their own. 

Several of the recent administrations have hired marketing experts to strategically plan how to word agenda items in order to elicit the desired reaction from the general population.  Naming a universal healthcare plan socialist is simply one of these cases.  And unfortunately, many people believe these words and base their own personal – or worse voting – opinions on this marketing.  So yes, this is a great way to prevent that all people in the U.S. can be guaranteed healthcare because too many people will be afraid to allow it to happen.

The biggest problem is that our healthcare system will never be solely one type of system and there will always be a mixture of coverage as in most universal healthcare systems in European countries.  Today’s universal healthcare systems in Europe do not necessarily represent a completely socialist government, however they do all represent a system that is better providing for the health of its citizens.  Perhaps we need to stop focusing so much on the labels of things and instead look at the desired outcomes that can be gained more efficiently by making a few “scary” changes.

Socialism=Communism

As many have already said, I think this continues to be an argument because the average American equates socialism to communism.  This concept has been embed into our heads as being negative, and so the word immediately illicits a negative attitude.

Second, I think the average American feels that rising health care costs are a result of government interference and so why should we let them completely take over. This link http://www.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/2007/06/universal_healt.html provides the debate of universal health care.  You can see in the con, the belief that Medicare and Medicaid allow people to receive unnecessary treatments at the cost of everyone else, except the patient.  The argument goes on to say that the only solution is to remove all control in order to recognize each citizens responsibility to pay for their own health care.

Senator McCarthy's Gift to America

I believe there are two main reasons for why socialism continues to be an effective argument against universal healthcare.  One is that due to the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the plethora of failed communist regimes, the American public is still adverse to anything “Red”.  I think to the average person “socialism” is synonymous with “communism” and therefore it is part of an evil form of policy and government that should be avoided at all costs.  The second, related reason is that we have a history of being fiercely individualistic as a nation.  As Ramon mentioned, we almost have a Pavlovian reaction to immediately and vehemently reject the idea of egalitarianism.  Also, we can refer back to the bootstraps discussion from last week.  There is the enduring feeling in this country that “social safety nets” are coddling those who do not have the discipline/ambition/strength to pull themselves up.

I think in order to ever achieve universal healthcare the distinction must be made between the tenets of socialism and those of communism.  One of the best explanations I have come across is that socialism is typically economic-based, whereas Communism is both economic and political.  Socialists generally feel that Capitalism and Socialism are not mutually exclusive.  A capitalistic society can benefit by adopting socialist aspects in order to mitigate the exploitation and inequity inherent in Capitalism.  Another difference is that Socialism bases the extent of distribution on an individual’s effort, whereas Communism distributes goods and services based on each person’s needs, regardless of effort.

I feel that it would be nearly impossible to actually find truly unadulterated socialism, so I could not seem to find any “true” socialist healthcare systems in Europe.  However, as Ara mentioned, the Swiss do seem to be a good example.  I did come across an article that presents one perspective as to how a true socialist healthcare system might look.  Below is a direct link to the full-text PDF version of the article.

 

http://www.springerlink.com/content/j36vn7503m206892/fulltext.pdf

Think people, think...good people

Why does calling universal health care "socialism" continue to be an effective argument against guaranteeing access to care for all in the U.S? To what extent are there any really socialist health systems in place in Europe?

As Sonny pointed out in his blog, people are scared of the word - their brains immediately associate universal health care with socialism and get turned off at its notion. This reminds me of the great physiologist, psychologist and physician, Ivan Pavlov, who observed that dogs can be conditioned to elicit particular responses when exposed to a specific paired stimulus. A New Yorker article "Pavlov's Brother" illustrates how Ivan performed test runs of the identical experiment on his younger brother, Nikolai, by pairing a ringing bell with food...After a few rounds, Nikolai would drool automatically when he heard the bell, even before the sight of food...He later replaced Nikolai with a collie and the two never talked...and the article ends describing Nikolai: "Those who remembered him from this last, sad phase of his life said that he never gave the slightest hint of having played such a pivotal role in the history of science, except when the telephone rang. "

Check out the full article @ :
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/11/15/041115sh_shouts

As public health professionals, we have a great responsibility to inform the people around us of full story. We cannot let industry propaganda and rhetoric condition society to fear universal health care. Each of us has the chance to engage people in a real conversation about universal health care - I have faith that as long as we reach people and engage them on a rational level, conditioned responses tying universal health care to socialism won't play much of a factor.

And though it's an uphill battle, health is the most basic of necessities and freedoms that we can provide individuals. As Lester Breslow stated, "The new goal is not to merely minimize the risks for disease but to seek the maximum potential for living." Universal health care to all, should remain a top priority!

***"Bold As Love" by Jimi Hendrix to get you in the mood***

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92106731

To summarize the article:

Switzerland's health care system: individuals — not employers or the government — choose from a broad array of health plans. Health insurance premiums are not linked to income. So everyone pays the same. Under Swiss law, insurers may not make a profit on the basic plan, which is quite comprehensive. Individuals, however, can adjust their premium up or down by choosing a larger or smaller annual deductible, or by joining an HMO-type plan that requires them to choose a doctor in a network.

Where Swiss health insurers can and do make profits, however, is on supplemental coverage. This is for things like dentistry, alternative medicine (which is popular in Switzerland), and semiprivate or private hospital rooms. For 30 francs per month, Cecile and her husband have a supplementary policy that covers, "for example, all kinds of prevention, not-on-the-list medication, help at home, glasses, transport, alternative medicine. That's a good one," she says. For another 105 francs each, they have another supplemental policy that guarantees them a semiprivate hospital room — and the possibility of a private, rather than a public hospital.

When the Swiss citizen was told about US's views on mandating health insurance, she replied: "That's really an American question. You are so used to having this individualistic way of thinking, and that's why you don't have these social [safety] nets. You still have this pioneer mentality where everyone has to take care of themselves"

That's not how people in Switzerland think about it, she says. That pioneer mentality, "is good for people who have no problems, but there are a bunch of people who ... need a social net. "I'm really happy to give part of my salary to a solidarity system," she says.

As seen from the article, even with the label of "socialism", there still are various caveats that introduce private finance and provision of health. However, as mentioned in the article, our "individualistic" nature prevents our adaptability toward new strategies of diffusing new technologies, regulating provision of scarce resources, and financing alternatives that would enhance social capital with the potential of finally being able to say successfully outweigh the benefits to the procedural costs, without any detrimental effects on the total cost-sharing.

Virus Update Needed

Backwards thinking lead to backwards problems. The red fear is still brewing even after Manny Ramirez left Boston Red to good ole Dodger True Blue. The label and stigma of socialism has not left America even after the end of Cold War. This is why I see the majority of America is using guarantee universal access as a socialist argument because we as a people have not got over ourselves in a sense. We haven’t left and separated the identity of communism and this new age “socialism.” We need to update our virus definitions in America, because if “socialism” is the main reason why we are leaving behind so many of our population on not getting treatment and health services, then we are a pitiful country and mirror image of our economy markets.

As far as other countries, I am not certain any of them fit that true fearful definition of America’s socialism term. Again, America needs to update to the latest definitions in their minds. While other countries around us and the world as a whole were adapting and changing to the new emerging facets of the modern times, we stayed content in our plateau ways and not awake to update.

Song of Blog: NKOTB and Akon - Put it on my tab

Dispelling the myths of universal health care

Labeling universal health care as "socialism" in the US has been an effective argument against its implementation because it exploits the one of the greatest fears of Americans; losing their freedom. They perceive that guaranteeing health care access to all translates into them being forced to pay for others by their taxes being raised. To many, they see this as a regulation of their lives, and more importantly, their money. Those against a universal health care system are able to promote market-based plans by claiming they are giving Americans more control over their health care. In 2007,while trying to promote his health care plan, Rudy Giuliani was quoted as saying, "The American way is not single-payer, government-controlled anything. That's a European way of doing something; that's frankly a socialist way of doing something." It's this rhetoric that will continue to worsen the current health care mess and deprive middle-class families nationwide.

In a Letter to the Editor of the Times Union (http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=723285), the author points out the by allowing us to have the "option" or make "decisions" regarding our health care has left 45 million completely uninsured, and decreasing coverage for the "insured" who develop serious illness or are unable to pay increasing premiums. Americans should stop viewing health care as an industry and should not allow insurance companies to continue to maximize their profits by denying care to individuals who are in the most need. Health care should be viewed as a public service similar to the military, federal highways, social security, the postal system, etc.

In my opinion, there are not any completely socialized health care systems in Europe. Socialized health care means a complete take over of the industry. But any country that still continues to have private doctors and private hospitals cannot be considered to maintain a socialist health care system. What most countries in Europe have that provide health care to all, such as England and France, is a payment system that helps provide care to those who need it the most.