The Triumph of Socialized Medicine Right here in the USA. (and "flakts")

[rodeodance]

http://www.slate.com/id/2114554/


The Triumph of Socialized Medicine
Right here in the USA.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, March 8, 2005, at 6:00 PM PT

The English language desperately needs a word to describe something that is objectively true but unrecognized as such because nobody wants to believe it. I hereby coin one: "flakt." Henceforth, a flakt will be defined as a measurable, demonstrable reality that the great majority of people refuse to acknowledge. It is a flakt that, even though the American public is convinced that foreign aid makes up a huge proportion of the federal budget—in one 2001 poll, respondents put it at 24 percent of total spending—foreign aid makes up less than one percent of the federal budget. It is a flakt that the war in Iraq has impeded the international manhunt for Osama Bin Laden. It is a flakt that Million Dollar Baby was nowhere near the best picture released during 2004.

Phillip Longman published an article in the January/February Washington Monthly ("The Best Care Anywhere") that states a very important flakt: Socialized medicine has been tried in the United States, and it has proven superior to health care supplied by the private sector. This is a case the Monthly has made at least once before, in an article published by Phil Keisling in 1982, and possibly before that. But Longman's article should leave absolutely no room for doubt. (I should note here in the interest of full disclosure that Longman is a friend of mine; that 20 years ago I was an editor at the Monthly; and that today I'm a contributing editor.)

The socialized medicine to which I refer is the complex of hospitals managed by the Veterans Administration. Longman cites a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2003 comparing veterans' hospitals with fee-for-service health care funded by Medicare. Both, of course, constitute socialized medicine in the sense that both are paid for by the federal government; but the hospitals treating elderly patients on Medicare are not government-run institutions. By every criterion, the New England Journal found the veterans' hospitals to be superior. This is especially striking when one considers, as the New England Journal noted, that patients in VA hospitals.........

.......To whatever extent hospitals absorbed these costs themselves, they'd have even less money left over than they do now to pay for computerization. What's really needed is to make private hospitals more like VA hospitals. Even Bush has recognized that "the VA has got an advantage because the--all the administrators work for the same--same outfit, the same organization." But he doesn't want to think about what that says about the virtues of socialized medicine. He doesn't want to face flakts.

[rodeodance]

1. socialized med. has and can work here--gee we are like the Europeans!

[KT2000]

2. Isn't Medicare

a form of socialized medicine?

[w4rma]

3. partial socialization. (nt)