Want medical care? Go abroad!

After seeing 'Sicko' a few months back, I accept no more excuses for poor health care. The United States is the only industrialized country in the world that doesn't have universal health care (relying instead on a greed-driven system that benefits insurers, drug companies, and other robber barons), and it boggles the mind that the state of health care in the U.S. and A. has declined so much that it now lags behind that of even most of the poorest countries in the world.

Twenty years ago, the American health care system was superb compared to the mess it is today. Now it's an alphabet soup of bureaucracy, greed, costly and ineffective drugs, and death. There's probably never been any society other than modern America where Big Business has gone out of its way to make such a bad health care system - and that's what's really unfortunate about the whole thing.

So now it comes as no surprise to us that U.S. citizens are flocking to Mexico, Hungary, and beyond just to see a dentist. Forty-five percent of U.S. residents now lack dental insurance. The situation is so bad that Americans who live thousands of miles from Mexico go there just to find good, affordable dental care, eye exams, or even stomach surgery. Closer to the border, retirement communities in Arizona actually have regular bus trips to Mexico to get dental care and medicine that's just too expensive in the good ol' U.S.A.

Dentists in Mexico often cost as little as one-fifth as those in the U.S. The difference between Mexico and the U.S. is so stark that folks in places like El Paso, Texas, now opt not to even get dental insurance because it's easier and cheaper just to go to Mexico.

Of course, when confronted with the data that can no longer be denied - that health care is more expensive in the U.S. - the party line excuse is that it's too easy in the U.S. to file malpractice suits. Of course, this too has been debunked. If malpractice insurance is too expensive, wouldn't the insurers be at least partly to blame for this? And it takes an act of Congress to sue an HMO. I mean that literally. A year or two ago there was a big controversy about whether health care bills in Congress should permit patients to sue HMO's - as if HMO's have some sort of special privilege to be automatically immune from legal action.

Hopefully the Big Lie about how the United States has a perfect health care system will be quieted now. But knowing the right-wing noise machine, don't bet on it.

(Source: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/health_science/weekly/20070702_Americans_flock_to_Mexico_for_dentistry.html)