Ok, I’m about to embark on what some (many?) consider to be a touchy subject, but because of some recent experiences I think it’s appropriate to discuss my point of view.

As you probably know, my daughter recently went through major heart surgery. In the months following we have been receiving billing statements that list what the cost of this procedure was. Everything from the actual surgery to consultations & medications. The total for all of this modern medicine has amounted to something north of $100,000. Crazy big money. Second mortgage money. More-than-I-can-afford money.

But our family has medical insurance, so our total out of pocket cost has been around $3000. I think that many would agree that is a bargain. Many in the US that is, but almost no one in any other developed country would agree. Why? Because they have socialized medicine. They would pay nothing out of pocket.

Okay, I may be losing some people here because they view the idea of socialized medicine, or government run health care as aberrant, which it is. It is different. We have become accustomed to the US healthcare system and something different is strange and sometimes scary. (Look at how all of the government workers and teachers in Wisconsin responded when the governor essentially dismantled the employment model that was the only thing many of them have ever known. I don’t necessarily disagree with what he was trying to do, but I think the way he has gone about it was a little heavy handed. But that’s a different story, and my point here is that drastic change can be disconcerting to anybody, no matter your political stance or beliefs).

Now here is why I am writing this now. I was recently in Greece for some business. While there I was working with a woman from the United Kingdom (England, really, but she’s proud). We got to talking and children came up and I mentioned to her how our daughter had surgery this summer. She was completely flabbergasted at how much we had to pay for this critical procedure. I found this completely ironic. Here I am thinking I’m getting off easy with a bill of $3000, and she is dumbfounded at the cost.

Of course this is because in the UK they have state medicine. Everybody living in their country (and many other developed nations) has complete, free, medical coverage their entire lives. We then got to talking about my weekly contributions for the privilege of having health insurance. Somewhere around $80 a week gives my family medical, dental, and vision (for me) coverage. That works out to over $300 a month for a total of $4,160 a year. That’s a lot of money, but because it comes out of my check each week before I see it, it doesn’t really effect me too much. That is, as long as I don’t think about it too often.

In the UK everyone pays into the system as a form of tax (Ooooo! Scary! a Tax!) that is about 10 pounds a month, or the equivalent of $15 a month. For that they get full medical coverage. For life. (I think, however, that it does not cover vision or dental, which would explain a lot about the Brits teeth, but I digress). That’s some bargain. Do you know what she pays for visits to the doctor? Nothing. No co-pay. None, zero, zilch, nada. Prescriptions cost a onetime payment of 7 pounds, about $10.

Now I know that a lot of these medical plans in Europe and other countries are having problems sustaining the model. I get that, and understand the system isn’t perfect, but it sure seems like it’s a lot better then what we have in the US. $15 a month? Can you imagine if everyone in the US paid $50 a month into the system? I’d be thrilled with kind of payment? Is it sustainable? I don’t know, that’s for smarter people than me to figure out, but I believe it is.

Which brings me to the Health Care Reform that has recently been written into law in the US (more commonly, and wrongly, known as Obamacare. Honestly, if you want to have an intelligent discussion about a topic please know what it is really called and not just refer to it with an incendiary term).

I know the Health Care Reform act has a lot of people in a tizzy. I agree it’s not the best plan – there are a lot of flaws with it. But there are a lot of good things in the law, and I also think that our current model is broken, and that something has to be done. Health insurance costs have far outpaced inflation over the past decade or more, and this may just be the first step in the right direction. It’s got to be better than doing nothing.

Here’s a chart that shows health care spending per person by country and the average life expectancy. It’s a couple of years old, but still relevant. It’s striking how much more health care costs in the US compared to nearly every other developed country in the world. (click on the chart for a larger view)

This chart was published at the National Geographic website. You may notice that some countries are not listed, but if you read some of the comments about the chart you find a response from the chart’s creator, Oliver Uberti, who explains the omissions this way:

As the graphic indicates, all 30 OECD countries were not shown. Because many countries like Germany and Italy had similar numbers that overlapped on the chart, I left some off to make the graphic easier to read. Also, a few countries did not have data for annual doctor visits. Here’s how the nine omitted countries measure up:

HEALTH CARE SPENDING (per person in U.S. dollars) 
Norway: $4,763 
Netherlands: 3,837 
Belgium: 3,595 
Germany: 3,588 
Ireland: 3,424 
Iceland: 3,319 
————-(OECD average: $2,986) 
Greece: 2,727 
Italy: 2,686 
Turkey: 618 

LIFE EXPECTANCY 
Italy: 81.2 
Iceland: 81.2 
Norway: 80.6 
Netherlands: 80.2 
Germany: 79.8 
Ireland: 79.7 
Belgium: 79.5 
Greece: 79.5 
————-(OECD average: 79.2) 
Turkey: 72.1 

DOCTOR VISITS A YEAR 
Belgium: 7.6 
Germany: 7.5 
Iceland: 6.5 
Netherlands: 5.7 
Turkey: 5.6 
Italy: no data 
Norway: no data 
Ireland: no data 
Greece: no data

Here’e the point I want to make. Imagine my wife and I had just had our little girl, and we didn’t have health insurance, for whatever reason (I had been laid off, my position didn’t include healthcare (Hello 90’s Walmart), or I was self-employed and the economy was tanking. Know anybody like that?). Now after dealing with the medical costs of actually having our baby we are faced with the knowledge of this heart defect. This isn’t cancer or MS or any other of a multitude of possible childhood illnesses that parents less fortunate than us have to deal with everyday. This is a treatable condition. But I don’t have insurance, nor do I have $100k. (And if I did get a job with healthcare, would they cover my daughter with her pre-existing condition?) What do we do? We probably don’t have the surgery for our daughter. She grows up apparently normal in every way, but in our minds we know it’s only a matter of time. Her heart is a bomb waiting to go off. We may never see any symptoms before it fails, but more likely we will see little signs, like shortness of breath and fatigue after climbing some steps. Teenagers shouldn’t become fatigued going up a flight of stairs to their room.

But we will not have to experience that. We are lucky. Others, I imagine, are not.

So why is a change to our healthcare system so scary? Well as I mentioned above, change is unnerving for people. It’s just human nature. We like what’s comfortable. But the opposition to a change in the system is very vocal. I know a lot of it is brought on by the need to rouse the rabble of the base by claiming fallacious things (Death Panels!), but there is also some serious financial implications for many US industries.

This is where I think the real opposition comes in. Insurance and pharmaceutical companies and other businesses in the medical field in general seem strongly opposed to any kind of socialized medicine in the US. They all see their profits diminishing or fading away. This is probably true in some respect, especially for the insurance companies. Profits over people. But you know what? Businesses fail all of the time. Look at the newspaper industry. Once so powerful, now struggling to survive. Not because of anything mandated, but just in the way that people now receive and consume their information. It’s a social, global sea-change.

But I want to take issue with some of the medical industries, specifically some of the pharmaceutical companies. I work at a pharmaceutical company, and I hear a lot of the company leaders speak on a lot of different topics. Here are two items that come up a lot:

1 – The new Health Care Bill is going to hurt us. It’s already cost us $X hundred million this year in revenue and will cost us the same next year.
2 – We are a global company and we are growing in expanding, international markets. The US is just a part of our global business.

Okay, what’s wrong with this picture? Here’s the part that doesn’t add up – if profits are strong in the global emerging markets which are largely socialized medicine, why are drug companies so opposed to having a similar plan in the US? I know that governments negotiate with the companies to get the drugs and treatments at a lower cost, but because more people are going to doctors more people are getting treated for all kinds of conditions. The cost per treatment may be less in other countries, but the volume is enormous. (I have no idea what the percentage increase is, but it would have to be enough to make up the difference of the lower cost treatments to be profitable, yes?)

Alright, I’ve said my piece. Let me just sum up with this – I don’t know what the right solution for the US is, but I sure wish that the conversation (especially from the right) wasn’t so inflammatory. A social sea-change in healthcare is what the United States needs.