For decades, critics of single-payer health care have raised the menace of rationed care, long waits, and "death panels."
Now, in our collective national effort to "flatten the curve" — to slow the spread of coronavirus to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed — we are seeing all three of these rumored pitfalls of "socialized medicine" in our for-profit system.
After all, the entire point of "social distancing" is to ration available care. Meanwhile hospitals are postponing elective surgeries, and hard-hit places like Washington State are discussing plans to determine who gets critical care at ICUs and who will be turned away.
At first the federal response to the pandemic was slow, as public officials spread false information, claimed they had contained the virus to a few individuals, and refused World Health Organization offers to help the U.S. develop its own COVID-19 test.
Since then it's taken more aggressive steps. But in the long term, it would be better to put in place a system to prevent and address crises before they threaten to end life as we know it.
It is too early to say which countries will prove most successful in containing the virus, but there are indications that those with single-payer systems have the advantage.
As Helen Buckingham of the Nuffield Trust told The Washington Post, the U.K.'s National Health Service is well-positioned to cope. It has a clear and comprehensive emergency planning structure with the ability to optimize resource use, even after years of government budget cuts.
Federalized health care means centralized patient information. As Kelsey Piper reported for Vox, Taiwan's ability to get information quickly from citizens' medical files, combined with proactive containment, enabled testing for the virus as early as December.
Despite high traffic with mainland China, Taiwan only had 45 confirmed cases of the disease and one death in early March.
Similarly, South Korea's aggressive testing and universal coverage helped the country "flatten the curve" more effectively than any other so far.
Importantly, single-payer health systems are far less costly. At over $10,000 per person each year, Americans spend far more on health care than any other wealthy country, yet our life expectancy is lower. Because of these out of control costs, many of us avoid going to the doctor altogether — another form of rationing.
For example, my last trip to the gynecologist was so expensive, due to both improper coding and an in-network test sent to an out-of-network lab, that I have yet to go back. A year and a half later, I continue to receive bills for a 50-minute preventative care check-up.
Avoiding the doctor for fear of the cost is bad in the best of times, disastrous in a crisis like COVID-19, and unheard of in places with single-payer care.
Certainly, single-payer is not a magical solution: Italy has a federalized national health insurance system similar to Canada's, and its northern regions are overwhelmed by the outbreak. But Italy's leadership was slow to recognize the pandemic and communicate that reality to its citizens.
Yet the rapid response in other European and Asian countries shows that, though single-payer systems are not a cure-all, they are able to better prepare these countries with clear emergency protocols, efficient information collection, and free access to care.
Rationing care, long wait lines, and "death panels" aren't what awaits us in a socialized system. They're hallmarks of our failed for-profit system, which is simply not up to the task of providing for our public health.
If we continue to put our political and economic ideologies ahead of our health, we stand to lose everything.
This article was originally published by Common Dreams and written by Ashar Foley.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.