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This is John Edwards’ Universal Healthcare Plan. I have added some comments about each of his solutions (they appear italicized).
• Promote Evidence-Based Medicine: Effective new treatments can take years to be widely adopted. For example, many patients do not receive beta blockers after heart attacks even though they are cheap and highly effective. Similarly, doctors sometimes prescribe name-brand drugs despite the availability of equally effective, less expensive generic drugs.

~Has it occurred that maybe, just maybe, there’s a reason for this? If I was a biotech company, and I had discovered a cure after spending millions on research, how would generic drugs created by some other organization/the government encourage me to do so, by siphoning my research to further their profits? I would have no incentive to find no cures if I can’t make money doing so. That’s why we’re losing out on anti-biotic research.

•  Disseminate Objective Information on Medical Advances: Edwards will establish a non-profit or public organization – possibly within the Institute of Medicine – to research the best methods of providing care, drawing upon data from Medicare and the Health Care Markets and medical experts from across the nation. ~This is such a bad idea, because it will have more bureaucrats involved whom have no idea what medicine is. We don’t have an infinite amount of doctors for this kind of low-paying, low-IQ, desk jockey work.

•  Help Doctors Implement New Advances: Edwards will support new technologies, such as handheld devices and electronic medical records, to give doctors the latest information at their fingertips.

~My local hospital already has these “new, latest technologies,” because it’s a privately run, not government baesd, hospital. Get with the program please.

•  Improve the Health Care Delivery System: Edwards will develop partnerships among academic medical centers, Medicare, and other federal agencies to make sure high-quality medicine is practiced everywhere. Improving quality is an important key to making universal health care affordable in the long run.

~As a to-be medical student, I ask you this: Why would I want to attend medical school for an extra 4 years, only to get paid the equivalent of, say, a DMV worker? I could just as easily use my skills, get an MBA in one year, and go to wall street, and make much more money. As such, why would our best students want to become doctors without any future realistic gain?

• Pioneer New Ways to Pay for Health Care: Our health care system is predominantly fee-for-service: providers are paid for each treatment, regardless of its necessity or quality. For example, a hospital that botches a surgery is often paid for the error and then paid again to fix it. Our system should pay doctors for results, encouraging better, more efficient care. Under Edwards’ plan, Medicare and the Health Care Markets will lead the way, paying higher rates to plans and providers that provide the very best care, lowering premiums for high-quality plans, and penalizing plans that fail to meet critical, easily quantifiable goals such as childhood immunization rates.
~Instead of having a federal bureaucracy ruin things by putting excess paperwork and waste time, why not just stop subsidizing the health insurance industry and let competition take its course? If an insurance agency is going to be stupid, the customers can get another insurer easily.

• Prevent Medical Errors: At least 100,000 patients die each year due to medical errors, according to the Institute of Medicine. Many other errors seriously injure patients and add to health care costs. Edwards will support public-private collaborations to reorganize patient care, improve internal communications, reduce errors through electronic prescribing, and establish basic quality benchmarks.

~Great, so now it’ll be easier for Mr. Edwards (a lawyer) to be ambulance chasing for malpractice lawsuits. And these are coming from generally our better doctors. What happens if they leave for China or Russia?

• Promote Preventive Care: Health Care Markets will offer primary and preventive services at little or no cost. Incentives like lower premiums will reward individuals who schedule free physicals and enroll in healthy living programs. Edwards will also support community efforts to improve health, such as safe streets, walking and biking trails, safe and well-equipped parks, and physical education programs for children.

~So not only are physicals free (hurting doctors and nurses), but maybe we should just give people free everything. After all, doctors would be willing to work without pay. Right?

• Improve the Treatment of Chronic Diseases: When chronic diseases are not routinely treated, they can cause emergencies that threaten patients’ health while raising costs. Health Care Markets will encourage plans to monitor patients’ health to keep them out of the emergency room. For example, plans can pay for nutritional counseling for diabetic patients to help them make healthy choices and control their blood sugar levels.

~More incursion into peoples’ lives. You can’t eat this, you can’t eat that, you need to take your pills. Give me a break. If I want to die from MDR-TB cause I hate needles, I have the right to do so. You have the right to prevent me from getting you sick. But they can’t tell people how to live their lives. That’s Soviet.

•  Empower Patients through Transparency: Finding reliable information comparing doctors and hospitals on price and performance is harder than finding it for a new car. Edwards will create a “Consumer Reports” for health care, a universal and easy-to-use report card to help Americans evaluate hospitals’ effectiveness in treating injuries and diseases. Informed patients will make better choices and drive health care providers to offer better services for lower costs.

~ Consumer Reports for doctors are like U.S. News Reports for Colleges. They use random statistics that are easily inflatable and will obviously favor those doctors whom have more connections, regardless of their capabilities. This is plainly “No Child Left Behind” for hospitals.

•  Reduce Health Disparities: People of color are more likely to be diagnosed with cancer and less likely to receive timely and effective treatment. Children of African-American mothers are twice as likely to die within their first year. In California, low-income minority neighborhoods have one-third as many doctors, as a share of their population, than other neighborhoods do. Edwards will support medical research into disparities, reduce the pollutions and toxins that disproportionately harm communities of colors, and support translation services to address language barriers. By helping all Americans get insurance, Edwards will also address disparities in health caused by disparities in insurance. [ACS, 2003; KFF, 2003; Kormaromy et. al. 1996; KFF, 2007]

~ Maybe it’s because doctors are afraid that they’ll get sued by ambulance chasers like Mr. Edwards here. Has it occurred that religion, among other things, may be affecting what doctors can do? Has it occurred that doctors, having spent thousands of dollars and years in medical school, not to mention hell via the pre-med process, might influence where they want to work? Why do you think hedge fund managers live in suburbs?

•  Improve Productivity with Information Technology: Health care administration costs more than $1,000 per American. It may be the fastest growing part of health care costs. [Woolhandler et. al., 2003]

~Exactly! Let’s exacerbate the costs even more by adding a bureaucracy.

• Adopt Electronic Medical Records: Many insurers and hospitals still rely on cumbersome paper systems and incompatible computer systems. The outdated “paper chase” causes tragic errors when doctors don’t have access to patient information or misread handwritten charts. It creates needless administrative waste recreating and transporting medical papers, performing duplicative testing, and claiming insurance benefits. Edwards will support the implementation of health information technology while ensuring that patients’ privacy rights are protected. Savings from electronic records could be as great as $160 billion a year, according to a RAND study. [RAND, 2005]

~This is of course all going to be paid by who?

• Support Local Infrastructure: Edwards will provide the resources hospitals need to implement information systems that improve patient safety and hospital efficiency. Steps include:

~Except, at this rate, we won’t have any hospitals left. In my region, three hospitals have closed down due to expensive malpractice lawsuits, leaving the hospital I attend very busy and crowded.

• New Methods of Distribution:  Adopting automated medication dispensers that can quickly and accurately fill prescriptions, freeing pharmacists to work more with patients and reducing the risk of prescription errors.
~Who’s going to pay for this?

•  Improve Communication:  Developing systems to promote patient-doctor communication, such as email and group consultations and support groups for individuals suffering from the same disorder.

~It’s called “alcoholics anonymous.”

• Creating computerized physician order entry to eliminate lost paperwork and illegible writing.

~Who’s going to pay for this?

o Developing computerized patient reminder systems to improve compliance with treatments, such as automatic phone calls home to remind patients to take needed medication to help keep them healthy and out of the hospital.
~Who’s going to pay for this?

o Using handheld devices to allow hospital staff to communicate results directly to physicians, instead of wasting time trying to find a doctor with urgent information.

~Who’s going to pay for this?

•  Protect Patients against Dangerous Medicines. Recent drug recalls such as Vioxx have raised concerns about drug safety. Edwards will restrict direct-to-consumer advertising for new drugs to ensure that consumers are not misled about the potential dangers of newly marketed drugs and strengthen the Food and Drug Administration’s ability to monitor new drugs after they reach the marketplace. He will also ensure that researchers evaluating medical devices and drugs are truly independent.

~Likewise, evolution is a “theory,” not a fact, and we need “independent, non-atheist devil-worshippers” to analyze this theory with evidence. Das Kommisar, anybody?

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The John Edwards’ Universal Healthcare Plan by New School Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.