Here's to your health.

In this week’s Time Magazine, Fareed Zakaria, CNN’s and TIME correspondent, writes about healthcare around the globe. I am going to quote liberally from his work.  Why?  Because many of you will not see the article and you should.  It would open your eyes to what is going on with the so-called Obamacare plan and why it would work for America if it were left alone.

Let us first start with a fact that Zakaria reminds us of – the law originally was penned (including the portion about individual mandate) by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, in the 1980’s.  It was developed to help the country out of a huge healthcare crisis.  We are spending 17% of our GDP on healthcare – and not getting our money’s worth.

So Zakaria took a look at two economies that are “free market” economies that have tackled healthcare in a similar fashion. The first is Switzerland, perhaps the most conservative country on the European continent and also the most, free-market.  It has an individual mandate in its national health insurance.  Everyone has access and they have cut their healthcare costs to 11% of GDP.  (Remember ours is 17%).  Their insurance is not tied to employers or unions or companies.  It is a national health insurance plan based upon companies that people are free to choose between and can switch once a year. High-quality healthcare at a reduced rate.  It is a huge concept.

But the other industrial nation that Zakari looked into was Taiwan. Remember no other developed nation spends more than 12 % of its total economy on healthcare except the USA. Taiwan, which provides excellent coverage for its citizens spends a whopping 7%.  Also with an individual mandate.

Why?  Because everyone must be covered for the system to work.  Everyone must have access to coverage of similar value for the system to work.  No one should be excluded.  Like they are in the USA.

But moral and ethical reasons aside, the economic reason alone makes sense.  The International Federation of Health Plans released a report, according to Zakaria’s article in TIME, that compared 23 medical services “from routine checkup to an MRI to a dose of a Lipitor.” Our country had the highest costs in 22 of the 23 categories. An MRI here costs on average $1,080 but in France it is only $281.

The Swiss and Taiwanese found that if you are going to have an insurance model, you need a general one, which covers all people.  Otherwise, healthy people opt out and sick ones get gamed out. Catastrophic insurance isn’t the answer because most costs they found out come from chronically ill patients, who account for only 5% of the total in population but over 50% of the costs.  Which is why the Heritage Foundation originally came up with the idea of people buying health coverage just as they do with car insurance. It is why Mitt Romney supported the Massachusetts plan and why Newt Gingrich praised the model years before he decided to make a run for the White House.

Zakaria explains that the Obama plan is not perfect.  It still ties too much to  employment health plans, but it is a steady improvement over nothing.  And if you uncouple industry and business from the costs of healthcare, they become economically more productive with firms overseas, whose countries already have adopted smart healthcare coverage, countries like Germany, Canada, Japan and Great Britain, whose companies are not saddled with health insurance costs.

So, even if you do not wish to help the 30-million Americans that Obamacare has opened coverage up to from a humanitarian point of view, then at least consider that it is beginning to make sound economic sense for the country.  And it should go further.  It should be uncoupled from industry, unions and become truly an individual mandate that every citizen must have to participate in heath delivery system in America.

It is not taking a single freedom away from anyone.  What it is doing is giving everyone coverage of healthcare with affordable costs and improved outcomes.

It is smart.  The numbers in free-market countries like Switzerland and Taiwan have proved it.  Now it is time for American to wake up and join the real world and not have healthcare manufactured in a vacuum, or worse, legislated by five votes on the Supreme Court.

I wish to thank Time Magazine for publishing Fareed Zakaria’s article. It makes so much sense.  Just as Obamacare does if your truly study it and tune out the left and right rhetoric.