On Sweden's move to a two-tiered health care system

by: los anjalis

Fri Dec 12, 2008 at 20:07:29 PM PST

AMY GOODMAN: I've been very interested in the social welfare system here, as the United States deals with greater unemployment, the crisis of healthcare. You have a social welfare system where healthcare is free in Sweden. And yet, you're seeing increasingly private hospitals and private insurance?

BRIAN PALMER: Yeah, many small changes to, in some way, make it harder for the general welfare state to function-for example, creating-allowing the creation of a private children's hospital in Stockholm only for paying customers and people with-

AMY GOODMAN: "Paying," as opposed to "pain," customers?

BRIAN PALMER: "Paying," yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Paying customers in pain.

BRIAN PALMER: Indeed, who will pay the full cost of their children's care, or people who have private insurance to do that. What this will do is start to create this kind of thing, will start to create groups of middle-class people who no longer have such a stake in the general welfare system, because they feel, well, I'm buying it anyway privately, and that will gradually erode middle-class support for the general welfare system that up to now has had very high levels of support from the middle class.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about the health insurance companies that are coming in?

BRIAN PALMER: They are very, very eager for this business. And it's a tremendous irony that, just at a moment when Americans, some of them discussing Michael Moore's film Sicko, see the very unethical behavior of different kinds of health insurance and health management companies, many of those same companies are getting the opportunity to buy pieces of Swedish healthcare clinics, parts of hospitals-according to a new law, even entire university hospitals can be sold out to private companies-so that as Americans have mostly become skeptical of these companies, they're being invited to Sweden to do damage here.

First of all, a great summary of the argument against a two-tiered health care financing system (a public system and a private system).

Second, right after Amy Goodman made the whole "paying as in opposed to pain customers?" remark, she actually laughed!  It's nice to hear her laugh, she's so strictly professional that she doesn't show much emotion.