Noam Chomsky on the US Healthcare System

Chomsky: But there’s a big elephant in the closet, and that’s the health-care system. If current tendencies continue, health care is going to overwhelm the federal budget. There’s another big elephant in the military budget. That’s just, you know, a huge, crushing component of the economy. Now, here’s a kind of case where you have to both support current measures and sharply critique them. So Obama’s health reform proposals are being criticized because they’re going to add to the deficit. But if they’re done properly, it would reduce the deficit, as long as—. There’s good reason why the US health-care system is [audio cuts out here] costly in the industrial world—I mean, it’s twice the per capita costs of other countries, has some of the worst outcomes: it’s the only privatized system, and privatization introduces a massive, a huge amount of bureaucracy, administrative costs, you know, surveillance, and so on and so forth, which is very expensive.It’s probably hundreds of billions of dollars a year. For decades, the public has wanted a national health-care system, something like what’s now called Medicare-Plus. Now, here’s a case where democracy just doesn’t function. What the large majority wants has been just off the agenda. I mean, now, you know, it’s beginning to sort of appear around the fringes. But if there was a move towards what the public wants, that ought to reduce health-care costs substantially. But it’s considered kind of politically impossible. You can’t really tamper with the privatized system. Or just take the cost of drugs. I mean, the cost of drugs is probably two or three times as high here as in comparable countries. It’s because of the power of the pharmaceutical corporations.