Beware the harpoon

Stephen Harper has in mind the destruction of our healthcare system, through the implementation of private health insurance, similar to that which now exists in the United States. The propaganda surrounding this issue is insidious to say the least. I am shocked at the apathy Canadians have been showing toward this issue which is so terribly important to us and to our children. I’m shocked by the willingness of the public to allow this to happen, with virtually no protest.

The very idea that the system now in place in the U.S. is in any way helpful to the public in that country is laughable. It works…as long as you don’t get sick.

A new study by Harvard University shows that nearly 50% of all Americans who file for bankruptcy do so because of medical problems, which they can’t afford.

It’s a shocking study, which shows clearly that a good job, a good education and a private health insurance plan, are no guarantee that a family won’t be wiped out by an illness or a serious accident.

Professor Elizabeth Warren, who helped conduct the study said that “We discovered that about 2 million men, women and children were snared in the bankruptcy system even though most of them had health insurance when they first got sick.

Many lost their jobs — and their insurance — because they got sick, while others faced thousands of dollars in co-payments and deductibles and for services not covered by their private insurance.

One person cited in the bankruptcy study, for example, broke a leg, missed a couple of months of work and then had $13,000 in unpaid medical bills, though his employer-based health plan had already paid for much of his care, Ms. Warren said.

Steffie Woolhandler, an associate professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School said that “We found that too often, private health insurance is an umbrella that dissolves when it rains”.

Hundreds of thousands of middle class Americans file for personal bankruptcy each year because of medical bills — even though they have health insurance, according to the study.

Even when people remain insured, the study also notes that many health plans have limits on certain kinds of coverage, like physical therapy or prescription drugs.

”If you’re sick enough long enough, you’re in deep trouble in our society,” said David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, another of the study’s authors.

While some policies do offer catastrophic coverage, which pays for care after costs reach a certain threshold, Dr. Himmelstein said that coverage ”often kicks in after people are bankrupted” because they must incur high medical bills to qualify.

And employees, who often have little choice of plans and frequently do not understand the differences among plans, are increasingly offered policies with less and less coverage, some policy analysts say.

”There’s a race to the bottom in terms of what health insurance means today,” said Ron Pollack, the executive director of Families USA, a consumer advocacy group in Washington.

This area is ripe for additional research, said Uwe E. Reinhardt, a professor at Princeton University, who said that there had not been enough hard evidence about working Americans who became ill and then went broke. ”We put together vignettes, but they are not powerful enough,” he said.

The findings raise questions about the effect of asking employees to bear a greater share of health cost through higher co-payments and the like. Many employers are shifting the increasing cost of care onto their employees, arguing that that trend gives workers an incentive to make judicious use of health care. But the researchers say higher co-payments and deductibles may well exacerbate the problem of medical bankruptcies.

If Harper has his way, this is the direction we are heading in.