Kolumni Helsinki Times: Healthcare high on Obama´s agenda 8.10.2009
The future of the public healthcare is a big political topic in aging Finland and Europe. How can we guarantee high quality healthcare services for our aging population in the coming years and decades? Where do find enough high qualified nurses and doctors to take care of our large retiring age-classes? These are the questions that arouse a lot of worries inside and outside Europe.
The United States spends more than any other country on healthcare. The country is expected to spend 2.5 trillion on healthcare in 2009, which accounts for 17.6% of their GDP. In contrast, for instance Finland spends less than 7%. Even one of the bigger healthcare spenders in Europe, Switzerland, spends less than 12% of their GDP on a system with universal coverage.
Obama is now starting the fight to make the United States join every other industrialized nation in having a national health care plan and requiring coverage. This fight will not be easy.
While in Europe healthcare is seen as more of a right than a privilege, this is not true of the United States. The conservative Republican party and even some fiscally conservative members of Obama’s own liberal Democrat party are resistant to any government-funded plan.
Many in the United States call such plans socialist, a term that has a negative connotation in American politics. During recent “town hall” meetings where members of Congress met with their constituents to discuss domestic issues many of the participants hurled insults at their representatives and demanded that the United States government stay out of the private healthcare system already in place.
This tension was raised recently when Obama gave a Congressional address concerning the changes in healthcare that he wanted to implement. One of the most controversial issues in the new healthcare bill is whether the benefits would apply to illegal immigrants, which in the United States mostly come from neighbouring Mexico.
This is important because there is a substantial amount of racial tension between Mexicans and other races in the United States. The conservative Republican party maintains that illegal immigrants would benefit from Obama’s plan. During Obama’s address a Republican representative shouted out “You lie!” after Obama told American legislators that the plan would not apply to those who reside in the United States illegally.
Like in Finland, the United States legislature has a strict code of decorum which prevents such outbursts. While the legislator later apologized, the fact that the incident occurred at all highlights the enormous amount of animosity growing between Obama’s liberal party and the conservatives who oppose him and his plan.
Another rumor that has made the new healthcare legislation difficult to pass is the existance of “death panels.” The legislation provides for a committee in specialized cases to check treatment decisions by doctors. However, these panels will not make decisions in life-or-death cases and they will certainly not decide whether or not older patients get to live or not, as some conservatives in the United States have alleged. The presence of exaggerations like these will make it difficult indeed for the United States to get an overhaul to their system.
Besides the misinformation about Obama’s plan in the United States, there appears to be a lot of misinformation about European healthcare in the United States as well. Most require that citizens be insured and all of them have publicly funded options. While there are sometimes longer waits for specialized care than there are in the United States, it is certainly a good trade off for having more coverage for less money.
From year to year there are from 40 to 50 million uninsured in the United States. This causes tens of thousands of deaths and even more heartache as the poor struggle to pay for medical bills outright. Infant mortality and life expectancy in the United States are behind other wealthy industrialized nations, and they lag far behind Europe.
Those who can afford to pay outright are in a better position in the United States. There are more and varied treatments available, and they are generally available faster than in Europe. But those who cannot pay their medical bills yet need life-saving treatment are in a far worse position than they would be in Europe. The system is working for a small percentage of wealthy Americans, but it is failing millions of those in the middle and lower class.
If compared to the United States, the healthcare for middle and lower classes is high quality in Finland. However, because of the aging population we have to be ready to invest some more public money for the healthcare in the coming years. As all the other people, the large retiring age-classes have deserved humane old age. This is something we can all agree, isn’t it? Wishing good luck for Obama and his healthcare reform.
Anneli Jäätteenmäki
Member of European Parliament
Vice-President of ALDE Group
