CNN does their fact checking on Sicko. It precisely illustrates why the stupid liberal media is both stupid and liberal.

Like Moore, we also found that more money does not equal better care. Both the French and Canadian systems rank in the Top 10 of the world’s best health-care systems, according to the World Health Organization. The United States comes in at No. 37. The rankings are based on general health of the population, access, patient satisfaction and how the care’s paid for.

Read those last words. “How the care is paid for”, i.e., the US system is ranked low partly because it’s not socialized. And as I’ve noted many times, “general health of the population” contains no corrections of America’s high rates of obesity, violence, car crashes and drug abuse. And by the way, those things are high because Americans are making stupid choices, not because their healthcare system has failed them.

So, if Americans are paying so much and they’re not getting as good or as much care, where is all the money going? “Overhead for most private health insurance plans range between 10 percent to 30 percent,” says Deloitte health-care analyst Paul Keckley. Overhead includes profit and administrative costs.

“Compare that to Medicare, which only has an overhead rate of 1 percent. Medicare is an extremely efficient health-care delivery system,” says Mark Meaney, a health-care ethicist for the National Institute for Patient Rights.

This is quoted a lot. And it is utter total BS. It is absolute mendacious deception. Yes, Medicare only spends 1% of its budget on it’s administration. The only problem here is that Medicare doesn’t administer Medicare. Medicare is administered by private insurance companies, which spend enormous amounts of money on paperwork and Administration. 1% is what Medicare spends administering the administration.

When I worked in medicine we were constantly in paperwork wars with Medicare. The appeals system was backed up for years. Talking to the Aetna people led me to believe that their administrative overhead was far greater for Medicare than non-Medicare (30-40% was the figure they would give me). This is somewhat exaggerated because Medicare pays very little — they haven’t significantly raised their fees in about 25 years. So the ratio of administration to pay-outs is a bit inflated. But they also provide more care.

Still. 1%? What kind of lazy media take that figure for gospel? Jumping Jesus, does anyone out there think anymore?

Moore focuses on the private insurance companies and makes no mention of the U.S. government-funded health-care systems such as Medicare, Medicaid, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and the Veterans Affairs health-care systems. About 50 percent of all health-care dollars spent in the United States flows through these government systems.

Hmm. Do you think there’s a reason he doesn’t talk about them? Like the rat-infested VAArmy hospitals? Or the crummy payments made by Medicare and Medicaid that cause us to cost-shift to people with private insurance?

That’s no surprise given the number of U.S. specialists. In U.S. medical schools, students training to become primary-care physicians have dwindled to 10 percent. The overwhelming majority choose far more profitable specialties in the medical field. In other countries, more than one out of three aspiring doctors chooses primary care in part because there’s less of an income gap with specialists. In those nations, becoming a specialist means making 30 percent more than a primary-care physician. In the United States, the gap is around 300 percent, according to Keckley.

And yet almost every healthcare reform plan — and the current structure of Medicare and Medicaid — is designed to screw the family doctor even more.

There’s a reason specialists in this country make so much: their services are not being rationed.

I hate it when the media talk about healhcare. They are so pig-ignorant of how the business works, they just make the situation worse. I’ll never forget the NBC/ABC/CBS special with Koppel/Brokaw/Rather (I can’t remember which, I was so angry) in which they said a doctor was charging his patient $150 a day for poking his head in her hospital room for five minutes. Ignored in this finger-wagging maneuver:

Listen, media. Do you think you could do some fucking research? I don’t mean going to various liberal think-tanks so they can tell you Medicare only spends 1% of its money on administration — a claim so ludicrous, you’d think even our flunky media would see through it. Why don’t you send a reporter to work in a hospital or a doctor’s office, to fight with insurance companies and to watch the malpractice lawsuits stream in. Then you might do some actual reporting.

Oh, that liberal media!

This is fairly typical of those who would defend or at least seriously contemplate socialized medicine:

I have little direct experience of government work, but both my parents have worked in state and local government (in a state energy office and a city welfare program) and I saw them working hard, being frugal in their work, making a lot happen with a little, accounting for every expense.

No one has ever said . . . OK, no one who’s reasonable has ever said that government employees are evil. My experience has been that ineffecient, nasty and wasteful government employees are rare.

No, the problem is fundamental. We have an education system full of nice, dedicated, hard-working people that is a disaster. A post-office filled with decent people that is incredibly expensive. And a military filled with good people that wastes billions.

Hell, even most Congressmen aren’t bad people. But we’ve got $70 trillion in unfunded liabilities to show that it’s a bad idea to give them too much money and power.

Everyone who encountered a socialized medical system will tell you that the people within are nice. People tend to be when they’re spending other’s money. I’m sure many of the people who ran the Soviet farm program that starved millions to death were just trying to do their best. And I don’t know a public school teacher who doesn’t work her butt off.

No, the problem is not bad people. The problem is that collectivism doesn’t work and never has and never will. We hear excuse-makers using this all the time — the idea that good people will make the system work. And it fails to happen every single time.

My own brief experience in consulting was, by contrast, one of huge amounts of waste: high-priced plane tickets bought at the last minute for no reason other than laziness, luxury hotel rooms, excessive quantities of staff, lavishly paid for by giant corporations and all to give them messages they wouldn’t act on, but needed to have hired in to check a box or cover their asses.

Don’t get me started on consulting. But in many ways, this is precisely the point. One of the biggest problems with health care today is that the consumer is too far removed from the process. Most people have no idea how much their insurance is shelling out. Most people have no idea how much their insurance costs. So decisions on cost are made on the corporate level, not the consumer level.

The solution to this is not to get the consumer further removed from the process.

HMOs — and remember that Hillary in 1993 wanted all of us to be in HMOs — are the worst of all possible worlds. The consumer has no power at all. The business makes all the decisions. And people are forced by their employer to stick with their HMO, no matter how crappy they are. And so the HMO employees get, to quote this reader, luxury hotel rooms and first class tickets, while some poor shmuck with cancer suffers.

All this suggests to me that much of the difference between efficiency and inefficiency, or smart and dumb decisions, in any given sector is cultural, dependent on local group and individual choices, on access and accountability, rather than a necessary structural effect of the profit status of the enterprise.

So the solution is to impose a uniform culture on everyone? We’ve seen what happens when you do that to education (thank you, NCLB). Or farming. Or culture war issues.

With socialized medicine, we will get the worst of all possible worlds. Inefficiency? Medicare wanted us to discharge patients after a breast biopsy and bring them back weeks later for mastectomy, rather than doing both at the same time. Dumb decisions? I will never forget Medicare telling us that removing a bowel obstruction wasn’t medically necessary.

No one is going to claim that a privatized consumer-oriented healthcare system is going to be perfect. But we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You think healthcare is expensive and inefficient now? You just wait until it’s free.

John Stossel tears David Brooks a new one:

Now David Brooks is a bright guy, so I wonder how he can blame the free market for failing in this way. He continues, “Despite all the incentives, 30 percent of kids drop out of high school and the college graduation rate has been flat for a generation.”

Excuse me, but why is that the market’s fault? Government dominates education in America. K-12 education is a coercive, often rigidly unionized government virtual monopoly that fights every attempt to experiment with free-market competition.

Read it.

Why would I never join a union?

Shit like this.

Amicus, Britain’s second-largest trade union, boasting 1.3 million members, has voted to throw its support behind the increasingly authoritarian government of Hugo Chavez, proclaiming that “International solidarity with the people of Venezuela is vital if the revolution is to survive.”

Christ on a Crutch, what is wrong with these people?

Sullivan has some great comments.

Like Sullivan, I’m pessimistic about our future in health care. I feel that we are likely to get some form of socialized medicine. And it will only be after it’s too late to go back that Americans will realize what they’ve lost. The sob stories in Michael Moore’s movies will change from people being denied healthcare by HMOs to *everyone* being denied healthcare by a faceless government agency. Experimental procedures won’t bankrupt you, they just won’t exist.

But my biggest point is on the innovation-killing aspects of “universal health care”. In many ways, the movement to socialize medicine is another of the “fuck the future” policies that are driving me crazy. Budget deficits, open-ended foreign wars, unfunded liabilities. It’s apparently not enought to rob the unborn of all their money. Now, in an effort to get cheap healthcare today, we are going to stifle innovation and invention. At least when our grandchildren are dying of drug-resistant typhoid, we can be grateful that we got numerous erections and lowered cholesterol.

There is no cost in the world greater than opportunity cost. People in socialized medicine systems see the great state apparatus — they do not see the privatized system that could be in its place. People in this country see the great Medicare. They do not see the system of private insurance which would be infinitely superior.

The biggest cost of socialized medicine and price-controlled drugs will be the innovations we *won’t* get, the things that *won’t* be there for our children and grandchildren. Cures to cancer and Alzheimer’s; perfect asepsis; technology to slow or even stop aging; surgeries that are less invasive and painful.

If we stick with the system we have now — perhaps with reforms to get the consumer closer to the spending, rather than futher away — our grandchildren will look back on our present healthcare the way we look at leeches and hacksaws from the 19th century. But socialism will gobble that bright future up. It will stagnate innovation and progress.

Is our healthcare so good right now that we’re ready to stick a fork in it?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the biggest reality on healthcare is how spoiled rotten the American people are. I heard the repugnant Richard Roeper reviewing “Sicko” the other night and he pronounced our healthcare system “a disaster”. Try telling that to people like Sullivan, who are alive because of expensive innovation — or my wife who is controlling her MS with expensive meds.

We spend more money on our cars than we do on our bodies. A history and physical is less than a year’s maintenance on a typical car. You will pay less out-of-pocket for life-saving surgery than you will for a high-end automobile. But it’s still too much for most people.

Whenever people complain about the cost of healthcare (and our insurance just laid out ten grand to bring our daughter into this world), I’m forced to ask:

How much is your life worth?