3 important days, beginning tomorrow.

As we get older our thoughts, unfortunately, turn increasingly toward health care. That's why the next 3 days are important to retirees. The Supreme Court is about to hear oral arguments concerning America's health care law.

Retirees would be mistaken to conclude that since the law is primarily about those below Medicare age it is of no concern to them. Everything about our health care system has an effect on Medicare recipients, either directly or indirectly.

We spend a lot of time in our country worrying about our projected deficits. If we could find a way to scale our health care costs back to a level the rest of the industrialized world has achieved, our deficit worries would vanish.

Fareed Zakaria has recently done a CNN special looking at how other nations have handled their health care problems. He has also written a piece about health care in the March 26 issue of Time Magazine. Unfortunately, the full article is not available on the web unless you are a Time subscriber. The first part, however, is all we need and it can be found by clicking here.

Zakaria's comments about Switzerland are interesting:

"The centerpiece of the case against Obamacare is the requirement that everyone buy some kind of health insurance or face stiff penalties - the so-called individual mandate. It is a way of moving toward universal coverage without a government-run or single-payer system. It might surprise Americans to learn that another advanced industrial country, one with a totally private health care system, made precisely the same choice nearly 20 years ago: Switzerland. The lessons from Switzerland and other countries can’t resolve the constitutional issues, but they suggest the inevitability of some version of Obamacare."

"Switzerland is not your typical European welfare-state society. It is extremely business-friendly and has always gone its own way, shunning the euro and charting its own course on health care. The country ranks higher than the U.S. on the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom."

"Twenty years ago, Switzerland had a system very similar to America’s - private insurers, private providers - with very similar problems. People didn’t buy insurance but ended up in emergency rooms, insurers screened out people with pre-existing conditions, and costs were rising fast. The country came to the conclusion that to make health care work, everyone had to buy insurance. So the Swiss passed an individual mandate and reformed their system along lines very similar to Obamacare. The reform law passed by referendum, narrowly."

"The result two decades later: quality of care remains very high, everyone has access, and costs have moderated. Switzerland spends 11% of its GDP on health care, compared with 17% in the U.S. Its 8 million people have health care that is not tied to their employers, they can choose among many plans, and they can switch plans every year. Overall satisfaction with the system is high."

"The most striking aspect of America’s medical system remains how much of an outlier it is in the advanced industrial world. No other nation spends more than 12% of its total economy on health care. We do worse than most other countries on almost every measure of health outcomes: healthy-life expectancy, infant mortality and - crucially - patient satisfaction. Put simply, we have the most expensive, least efficient system of any rich country on the planet. Costs remain high on every level. Recently, the International Federation of Health Plans released a report comparing the prices in various countries of 23 medical services, from a routine checkup to an MRI to a dose of Lipitor. The U.S. had the highest costs in 22 of the 23 cases. An MRI costs $1,080 here; it costs $281 in France...."

"The Swiss ... found that if you’re going to have an insurance model, you need a general one in which everyone is covered. Otherwise, healthy people don’t buy insurance and sick ones get gamed out of it. Catastrophic insurance - covering trauma and serious illnesses - isn’t a solution, because it’s chronically ill patients, just 5% of the total, who account for 50% of American health care costs...."

It continues to amaze me that Americans have not been able to solve a problem that is so important to our well-being, especially when we have the experiences of all the other industrialized nations to draw upon as a laboratory.

By the way, if you're interested in our previous discussions of other health care systems, they can be found in the June, 2011 posts.