Bill Clinton Says US Healthcare System Immoral

Former US president Bill Clinton has said that the country's was collapsing threatening the country's well-being, former President Bill Clinton told a symposium in San Francisco on Saturday.

"Our health care system is immoral because it doesn't provide health care to everybody," said Clinton at a symposium.

"It's wildly uneconomical. We pay more than everybody else in the world for less."

"It is sowing the seeds of its own destruction," said Clinton, who said health care was one of the top three problems the country faces, along with economic inequality and energy dependence.

In a severe indictment of the current state of American health care, the former president noted the country was spending as much 16 percent its national income on health care, compared with 11 percent in Canada and Switzerland, the countries with the next highest spending.

Yet the United States ranks only 37th in the world in overall health care, insured fewer of its citizens and paid more for its drugs, Clinton said.

Nearly a third of U.S. health care went to administrative costs, the highest in the world, he said.

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"We're letting the health insurance financing tail wag the health-care dog," he said.

Clinton, who has spent much of his post-presidential years working to address the worldwide AIDS epidemic, said American taxpayers spend 10,000 dollars a year for AIDS treatments that cost only 3,500 dollars in other countries. Coming down strongly on drugl industry's opposition to importing cheaper, generic drugs from Canada, he remarked sarcastically, "They've developed generic immunity, an immunity to cheap drugs."

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Several experts have lashed out at the current Bush administration for its healthcare policies and contended that those lower down the economic scale were going through some nightmarish times.

Since the presidential election is slated to take place next year, the healthcare situation is generating a lot of heated discussion. But none has come out any with any concrete action plan so far.

At the San Fransisco meet, Clinton didn't advocate any solution to the health-care crisis. All that he would say was there were several options.

Only last month during another debate on health care, his wife, Hillary Clinton, seeking Democratic nomination, declared,

“We’re going to have universal health care when I’m president — there’s no doubt about that. We’re going to get it done.”

In reference to her failed effort to establish a universal health insurance system in 1994, Clinton said that “we’re in a better position today to do that,” because the number of U.S. residents who lack coverage has increased and because “so many people with insurance have found it’s difficult to get health care because the insurance companies deny you what you need.” She added, “I believe the American people are going to make this an issue.”

However she too failed to reveal any details. She said she had not “set out a plan and said here’s exactly what I will do” because she wants “the ideas that people have.”

Source-Medindia
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