August 13th, 2009 at 2:08 pm ·

Forget Canadian and British health care, the Franco-German system works

No Waiting,

No Bureaucracy, Freedom for Doctors,

Choice for Patients

In July and August of 2009, fueled by the Internet, two crises for the Obama administration surged to the forefront, and both reveal more than anything else the acute fear many Americans feel about Mr. Obama himself and also his overall agenda of Big Government, which rocker and populist commentator Ted Nugent has denounced as “Fedzilla.” One steadily growing crisis has been the question over his birth certificate (with now numerous mainstream newspapers’ political cartoons and network TV shows denouncing and defaming the so-called “birthers”). The other crisis has been triggered by Barack Obama’s proposal for national health care, with livid opponents appearing at town hall meetings to shout at their congressmen, and in particular express fears of “death panels” where the elderly would be cut off from expensive treatments, and counseled to give up and die to save the system money.

In reality, both crises, aggravated even more by the swine flu panic that the government is deliberately stirring, and its proposal for forced vaccination using military troops (as FOX Cable News’ Steve Doocey reported), reflect deep public unease about Barack Obama’s crew being in charge of those or indeed of any federal programs. Mr. Obama’s approval numbers have been plummeting of late, especially among white voters (who seem to be 100% of the town hall shouters), and all the more since he interfered verbally in the Professor Gates/Sergeant Crowley arrest case in Cambridge, Massachusetts, siding publicly and seemingly automatically with the unruly black arrestee against the white cop.

What is worsening public fear is also abysmal ignorance. Government health care is being denounced as “Nazism” by neo-con commentator Glenn Beck, who lies that Hitler practiced euthanasia on the elderly, and by the porky Oxycontin abuser Rush Limbaugh.

What many in this dumbed-down society do not realize is that the United States is literally the only advanced country in the Western world without universal health care. I have actually lived in France and in Austria, was married to citizens of both those countries, and I have used their health systems, which are patterned after those of Hitler’s Germany. No one in any other Western country would dream of reverting to our American system of hyper-capitalism, where bureaucrats in private insurance companies, dominated by Wall Street, decide which of your illnesses are denied coverage, or half covered, or rejected as a “pre-existing condition.” As a result of our private health bureaucracy, the number-one cause of personal bankruptcy today in America is gigantic medical bills. No European, Canadian or Australian faces such a financial shipwreck when he or she falls sick.

In 2005, when I was married to a French citizen, I was in the French universal health care system for treatment for four months, patterned on the German system founded by Otto von Bismarck in the 1880s, expanded under the Weimar Republic (1919-33) and completed by Adolf Hitler (1933-45), and my experience was that it was superb. In fact, it is considered the world’s best, better even than even the German system nowadays. It costs plenty, but then France does not pay for 11 “aircraft carrier battle groups” to ply the seven seas firing missiles off and launching jets to bomb caves. The French live two years longer than we do because of this system — and this is true despite their smoking like chimneys. 😉

The German and French system is based on obligatory payments by employers to a locally run fund. The employer then deducts part of his payment from the worker’s paycheck. The system at first insured only the poorest members of society, but then was expanded to now over 90 percent of the population in both countries.

The main changes under Hitler to the original German plan were fivefold: 1) Hitler gradually fired all Jewish doctors by 1938, his fifth year of power, which created more work for German physicians and made them very happy;

2) his government took over control of the local funds, doctors had no more headaches dealing with them, and their incomes went up; all doctors became members of the new government-run Reich Chamber of Physicians; 3) abortions and contraception were banned so the birth rate would increase; 4) imitating legislation in many states of the United States, the severely mentally retarded were sterilized, if the cause was hereditary, although only after a strict procedure of hearings, so their birth rate would decline to zero; 5) Hitler had a brief peacetime program, ended after Catholic protests, to mercifully euthanize psychiatric inmates who had been complete “mental vegetables” for years or who were violently insane, hurling themselves against walls, living for years in straitjackets and trying to bite themselves, staff and visitors, but this was carried out only if the cause was hereditary, not, for example, from a blow to the head. This euthanasia program was secretly restarted during the war, Hitler saying that “while the best men are dying at the front, and the nation’s survival is at stake, we cannot afford to keep feeding the most useless.” All five innovations by Hitler were canceled by the Allies when they occupied Germany in 1945.

The reason why the French, using the German system, live two years longer than Americans is yes, their red wine, and likely also their lower divorce rate, and the French sense of humor about life, but more importantly, every Français (and every Deutscher in Germany) can run to the doctor at the first ache, twinge or pain and get it checked out long before the problem gets worse.

And there is no red tape and there are very few treatment mixups. One health care card in France, the Carte Vitale, is presented to be swiped electronically through a machine at any pharmacy, clinic, doctor’s office or hospital – and all your bills are instantly paid for, except of course vanity cosmetic surgery such as nose jobs. (Oy, is this covert antisemitism?) And all your relevant medical records are available to the professionals treating you – not to a private insurance bureaucrat or a government bureaucrat. If you are delivered in a coma to an emergency room 300 miles from home (and France is a Texas-size country), this Carte Vitale gives the physician your blood group, your medical history, your allergies, x-rays and blood tests, and thus mistaken prescriptions and lethal drug interactions are nearly impossible.

The French Carte Vitale pays all medical bills and gives any doctor or pharmacist your health records to prevent dangerous errors.

 

In reality, to say, as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh do, that no government health care can work is as illogical as saying that because the Italian and Polish armies in World War Two were poorly run by their governments, therefore no armies should be run by governments — and all armies should be run by mercenaries! Certainly, in WWII the German Wehrmacht and the US Army were run very effectively by their respective governments. It is a question of which government and which plan.

Now, government health care in Canada and Britain do involve serious waits for elective surgery, but the French and German systems are not afflicted by these delays. And no, France and Germany do not have “socialized medicine,” that is, they do not have a government-run health service where civil servants hired under affirmative action know all about your hemorrhoids. Their health care is run by private non-profit associations – monitored of course by the public, the media and the government – and these non-profit associations cover almost everyone in the country.

All effective universal health care today actually goes back to the Germany of the 1880s, although Germany never gets any credit for it (just as Napoleon never gets any credit for inventing military decorations, ribbons and medals, which now seem self-evident in all militaries, and people assume wrongly they were always around). The prime minister of Prussia who later became the first chancellor of the German Reich, Prince Otto von Bismarck) invented universal health care — partly out of compassion and partly out of fear that the German working class would otherwise vote against the conservatives and for the leftist, marxist Social Democrat party. He feared a leftist takeover of the Parliament, the “Reichstag.”

Caption: Prince Otto von Bismarck not only united Germany in 1870, but in 1883 tried to unite the classes by making health care possible for workers as well as for the affluent. (He also rammed through accident insurance in 1884 and retirement and disability income in 1889, which Franklin Roosevelt called “Social Security” 46 years later. (The highly educated Bismarck did not just give speeches about “blood and iron,” but also spoke and wrote fluently about world affairs in English, French and Russian. As a young man he would often quote Shakespeare or Lord Byron in letters to his wife, whose maiden name was Mencken, also that of a famous American writer. Curiously, although a large, burly man, Bismarck had a surprisingly high-pitched voice.)

The next big step forward for Europe was right after World War Two, when most countries copied the German medical program, including France under General Charles de Gaulle, who after the Normandy invasion of 1944 became Provisional President of the French Republic. Many specific programs of the Hitler years were also adopted, such as payments to couples for each child (”Kindergeld”) and generous loans to newlyweds to furnish and start a household. (Russia under Vladimir Putin introduced this program in Russia.)

 

Charles de Gaulle admired the German enemy, and copied the health care system across the Rhine and many other German innovations after WWII.He exclaimed in his war memoirs about the German blitzkrieg of 1940: “ Like a broom, the Germans swept away the armies of France in six weeks!”

De Gaulle_January_Febuary2008

 

What is not generally known is how much Charles de Gaulle actually admired the dynamic Hitler and indeed all things German, with the proviso, naturellement, that the occupying of France was not one of them. In the third volume of his war memoirs, (published as Mémoires de Guerre, in 1959, years after the dust and hatred of the war had settled in his mind) the French leader said of his onetime foe that he was “a titan struggling to lift up the world” and “a Prometheus,” a man who was “passionate, skilled, knowing how to caress and charm, and even seduce” in order to realize his “plans gigantesques” with his “prodigious energy. “ De Gaulle further credited his wartime enemy with “obtaining more effort [from the Germans] than any people has ever offered any other leader,” “know[ing] how to capitalize on every opportunity” and possessing skill in dealing with the “ludicrous politicians of the enervated democracies.” (As many revisionist historians have noted, in his entire three-volume Mémoires de Guerre, De Gaulle does not mention with one single syllable Hitler’s supposed extermination of six million Jews during the war, an astonishing lacuna, but only if De Gaulle believed it happened.)

De Gaulle, as provisional president in 1944-46, copied not only the Bismarck-Hitler health care system – using, ironically, a Jewish cabinet minister named LaRoque to set it up – but later on he also instituted a system, not unlike the German, to ensure that all workers could enjoy free vacations. (The French system requires employers to fund group vacation outings by the entire staff, and is a great boon to hotels, restaurant and resorts as well as improving the labor-management atmosphere.)

As the Boston Globe article entitled “France’s model healthcare system” (by Paul V. Dutton, August 11, 2007) points out, “the World Health Organization rated [the French system as] the best in the world in 2001 because of its universal coverage, responsive healthcare providers, patient and provider freedoms, and the health and longevity of the country’s population. The United States ranked 37.”

The French system is not cheap, in fact, at $3,500 per capita it is one of the most costly in Europe, yet that is still far cheaper than the $6,100 per person in the United States. The French system takes 10% of the French economy; the U.S. system devours 16 percent.
The French share our American dislike of restrictions on patient choice – and their system therefore insists on autonomous private practitioners – again, this copies the German system of Bismarck and Hitler – rather than a British-style national health service, which the French scorn as “socialized medicine.” Virtually all physicians in France participate in the nation’s public health insurance, la Sécurité Sociale. (The French call it “la Sécu” for short — but definitely not “la SS”…..;-))

French doctors have a freedom of diagnosis and therapy of which U.S. doctors, under the thumb of their HMO masters, can only dream. Now the average American physician earns over five times the average US wage, but the average French médecin makes only about twice the average French income. But, as in Germany, malpractice lawsuits are nearly unknown and malpractice insurance for doctors is very cheap. (I remember dining once in Regensburg, Germany in 1975 with an American doctor with a florid Irish face from Chicago, Illinois. He had moved his entire practice to rainy Germany, saying he could not stand the obscene premiums he was paying because of, quote, “shyster malpractice lawyers.”)

Furthermore, in both la France and in Germany, medical school is free, so a 30-year-old doctor is not paying back $250,000 in college loans and having to hike his fees correspondingly.

Sécurité Sociale has also created a standardized and speedy system for physician billing and patient reimbursement using electronic funds. When you visit a French clinic, doctor’s office or hospital you often see only medical personnel, no billing clerk. In America there are hordes of invoice specialists whose sole purpose is to battle with insurers and their constantly changing rules of payment, non-payment, and partial payment.

A very great concern now in America is about the waiting lists in Canada and Britain for elective procedures and pre-authorizations. France and Germany do not have these horrors. Universal health insurance in France began under de Gaulle, as in Germany 60 years before then, not with the government imposing a faulty system full of problems, but based on reasonable agreements with doctors and private insurers.

French doctors signed off on universal health care in 1945 only after the law protected a patient’s choice of practitioner and guaranteed the physician’s control over medical decisions. De Gaulle also dealt with insurance industry concerns by permitting the industry to administer the new healthcare fund. Private health insurers also still work as supplemental insurers and thus they cover the patient expenses that are not paid for by Sécurité Sociale. In fact, almost 90 percent of the French buy supplemental coverage, making for a prosperous private health insurance market.

The French system, like its model, the German, strongly discourages the “experience ratings” that occur in the United States. These are statistical calculations of insurance premiums based on previous costs. The Franco-German system makes it more difficult for insurers to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions and bad health. The French system does have one major obstacle today: payroll taxes paid by companies are too high and they discourage hiring. Paris, still under Gaullist governments today, is now shifting toward higher personal income taxes – the money having to come from somewhere – to relieve the burden on companies. (The major problem for the German system is the rising costs of prescription drugs.)

The French and German systems, were they adopted in our country, would also give much greater freedom to switch jobs. We Americans profess to be in love with our “freedom,” Braveheart-like, but economists estimate that between a quarter and half the US labor force is now “job-locked”. This means they may hate their boss, their work conditions, their co-workers, the commute, or the pay, or all five, but they stay put in their misery just to keep their health coverage going or to avoid triggering exclusion under their next employer based on a “pre-existing condition” they got while at the previous job.

Universal health care can be a source of longer life and fewer worries, but it depends on the government and the program. The French system, based on the German, is very efficient indeed, and I know. I was in it for four months. Of course, in the French system, even the hospital food was délicieux. Hundreds of thousands of Britons, Americans and Canadians live permanently in France – they have their own English-speaking “watering holes” (bars) all over the country — and I have sat in them comparing notes with fellow WASPs. These Anglos will second every word I have said about the excellence of French health care, an offshoot of the German system.

If the American people actually trusted Barack Obama with their lives, their health or anything else, and if he would speak of the French and German systems, and move the discussion away from the bureaucratic Canadian and the nationalized British models, then the Congressional “town hall” meetings held across America would not become verbal combat zones any longer. We need reform. No one should face bankruptcy – or even a lack of treatment and possible death – due to the continuation of the current American system, which enriches only Wall Street and Big Business, and gobbles one dollar in six in our struggling economy.

* * *

Is there an apiru [Jewish] angle to all this? Yes, there is. Ever since the Jews, using their puppets, founded the Bank of England in the 1690s, they have favored and glorified England, because it has been their great enforcer. When the British Empire, for example, shockingly invaded China twice in the 19th century to force the Chinese emperor to permit the opium trade, it was the Iraqi juze of the Sassoon family who were running that opium trade, selling  opium grown in British India. (And every Chinese who hates white people should know that fact, that the “long noses” were just the juze’ puppets.)

In 1913, the founding of the ADL, the IRS and the Federal Reserve began the massive apiru conquest of the United States. Since then, the US has also been a “most favored nation” of the juze, as long as it harms only itself and others, never jewry.

So, incredibly, the only mental point of reference for the average brainwashed American is “does government health care work in England or English-speaking Canada?” If it does not work there, then it must not work at all….. And Germany and France barely exist…. and as for France, for them, well, it’s a Third World country to many Americans.

In point of fact, France has a MUCH bigger economy than Britain! High-tech trains, computers everywhere,  clean streets and sparkling restaurants, buses and  shops.

But France is considered vaguely antisemitic  — so it does not exist for the average dumbed-down United Stateser. When France categorically refused to join the mad US invasion of Iraq in 2003, American juze declared a near war on that country and its people, especially on the whorish FOX Cable News.

I remember my then wife, a Frenchwoman from Strasbourg, being literally assaulted at a Borders Book store on School Street in downtown Boston during the worst of the freedom-fries frenzy…. Rammed from behind with a sharp elbow twice by a white (or juish?) male twerp….which ended only when another magazine browser noticed it and confronted the jerk……Unbelievable…. but she was accosted right in my presence as well, by a fatso in the supermarket who demanded of her:  “Do you even LIKE Americans?!”

Clearly, his premise was that even though she must hate America, France was such a backward place that she had fled here for survival……  I realized even more clearly just how dumbed-down we were as a nation about France when I had a client over for a voice-improvement class at out then home in Smithfield, Rhode Island. His daughter was just starting as a TV reporter and needed help with her voice. As I worked with her, her father sat and chatted with my then wife. He was a genuinely very, very nice guy and the assistant pastor of a mega-church.

To make pleasant and edifying conversation, he turned to my French wife of that time and asked her, beaming with pride:

“So when you came to America and saw all this, what did you think?”

She did not understand.

He explained, gesturing:

“You know, TV sets, and telephones and modern conveniences.”

She was dumbfounded.

“What do you mean?….. Do you mean…. you think we do not have these things in France?”

Cringe. Mortifying…..

Sometimes I think of Lee Greenwood’s country-western hit song: “Well, I’m proud to be an American, ‘cuz at least I know I’m free…”

Well, that’s all you know, buddy — and even that sure ain’t so at all.

As Goethe said, no one is more a slave than a slave who thinks he’s free.

French bullet train. A TGV test train set the world record for the fastest wheeled train, reaching 574.8 km/h (357.2 mph) on 3 April 2007. TGVs operate at the highest speeds in conventional train service in the world, regularly reaching from 320 km/h (200 mph) to 360 km/h (220 mph) on the LGV Est, LGV Rhin-Rhône and LGV Méditerranée.